title: King (chess)

text: If this happens, the king is said to have been stalemated, and the game ends in a draw. A player who has very little or no chance of winning will often, in order to avoid a loss, try to entice the opponent to inadvertently place the player's king in stalemate (see swindle).


title: King (chess)

text: The king's predecessor is the piece of the same name in shatranj. Like the modern king, it is the most important piece in the game and can move to any neighboring square. However, in shatranj, baring the king is a win unless the opponent can do the same immediately afterward; stalemating the king is a win; and castling does not exist.


title: King (chess)

text: In the opening and middlegame, the king will rarely play an active role in the development of an offensive or defensive position. Instead, a player will normally try to castle and seek safety on the edge of the board behind friendly pawns. In the endgame, however, the king emerges to play an active role as an offensive piece, and can assist in the promotion of the player's remaining pawns.


title: King (chess)

text: It is not meaningful to assign a value to the king relative to the other pieces, as it cannot be captured or exchanged and must be protected at all costs. In this sense, its value could be considered infinite. As an assessment of the king's capability as an offensive piece in the endgame, it is often considered to be slightly stronger than a bishop or knight. Emanuel Lasker gave it the value of a knight plus a pawn (i.e. four points on the scale of chess piece relative value), though some other theorists evaluate it closer to three points. It is better at defending friendly pawns than the knight is, and it is better at attacking enemy pawns than the bishop is.


title: National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program

text: The space-grant colleges are educational institutions in the United States that comprise a network of fifty-two consortia formed for the purpose of outer space-related research. Each consortium is based in one of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, or Puerto Rico, and each consists of multiple independent space-grant institutions, with one of the institutions acting as lead.


text: Similar programs include sea-grant colleges (instituted in 1966) and sun-grant colleges (instituted in 2003).


text: The National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program was established in 1988 by the US Congress following the success of similar scholarship opportunities in the oceanic Sea Grant and agricultural Land Grant fields. The catch-all term Space Grant refers back to these previous federal programs. In 1989, the program was given over to NASA, which now administers it in the same way that NOAA administers Sea Grant.


text: The first meeting of the National Council of Space Grant Directors took place from January 16 to January 19, 1990, at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Columbia, Maryland, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, California.


text: BLAST is a three-day summer event that takes place at Virginia's Old Dominion University. This free, STEM-centered event, is available to 8th and 9th graders with a 2.3 GPA or better. BLAST's purpose is to show the students the interesting aspects of STEM to those who are unsure whether they want to be involved in STEM or not.


text: The eXploration Systems and Habitation (X-Hab) challenge seeks better the academic and technological abilities of university students. It utilizes hands-on training in the implementation of space habitats for deep space missions. There is an Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) Division where university students can compete to win awards worth $15,000–50,000 for a functional design that the AES finds useful and, or, interesting.


text: Established in 2008, the John Mather Nobel Scholars is a scholarship program open to NASA-Goddard Space Flight. The program provides $3,000 so that a chosen participant can share their research paper with NASA professionals. To be a part of this program, a GPA of 3.5 or higher is necessary along with being a junior or higher.


text: The NASA/Kennedy Space Center Higher Education Support Services supports college grade Higher Education competitions. Such competitions entail internships, senior design projects, and selective grants.


text: The National Space Grant Distinguished Service Award was created by Josh Simpson and is awarded to students who will have an impact in a STEM field related to NASA’s mission/goals.


text: The goal of the Space Grant Support Services is to better the Space Grant network. The Space Grant Support Services supports the Space Grant network in many different ways from an economical view to a public view.


text: The Space Systems Engineering Website is a free, six-week, online course that allows students to work and learn with NASA's engineers. Course materials will always be accessible and students are able to use the learned resources in any way they please.


text: The Virginia Aerospace Science and Technology Program is a one week, online, STEM summer program. The program focuses on NASA-related research provided by NASA's STEM professionals.


text: The Virginia Commonwealth STEM Industry Internship Program or CSIIP, provides an online internship application system for STEM majors. This was done for the people to meet the increasing demand for citizens with STEM majors.


text: The Virginia Earth System Science Scholars is a STEM-centered program where participants participate with NASA's professional researchers. The Virginia Space Coast Scholars (VSCS) program is an online, week long, STEM-centered program that focuses on the study of NASA's missions.


text: The William A Hiscock Space Grant Scholarship Fund was created "in memory of William Hiscock, the former director of the Montana Space Grant." Due to his efforts, many NASA ballooning centered programs were created.


title: Gap year

text: A gap year, also known as a sabbatical year, is typically a year-long break before or after college/university during which students engage in various educational and developmental activities, such as travel or some type of regular work. Gap years usually occur between high school and college, or after graduating from college and before entry into graduate school. Students undertaking a gap year might, for example, take advanced courses in mathematics or language studies, learn a trade, study art, volunteer, travel, take internships, play sports, or participate in cultural exchanges. Studies indicate that students who take a gap year perform better academically than those who do not, however, many parents worry that their children will defer continuation of their education. Many students have even decided against going to university after taking time to reflect during their gap year.


title: Gap year

text: A gap year is described as “a semester or year of experiential learning, typically taken after high school, and prior to career or post-secondary education, in order to deepen one’s practical, professional, and personal awareness”. During this time, students engage in various educational, work related, and developmental activities such as internships, work experience, travel, volunteering, participation in cultural exchanges, studying art or learning a trade, etc. Though gap years come in many different formats – from structured programs to personal exploration – the purpose of taking a gap year is usually founded on the common needs of young people to: gain deeper self-understanding, expand their world-view, and recharge between traditional academic experiences. On the other hand, rejected college or employment applications have also caused high school students to pursue a gap year.


title: Gap year

text: Taking a gap year can have significant benefits to one’s academic path as well as career trajectory. This time taken off can help college students from “burning out” or turning to indulgent behaviors as a result of unhealthy stress. During this year, students can explore different interests while gaining experience and maturity before beginning college. It gives young people the time to make an informed choice about the path they wish to pursue, as well the experience of real world situations to match to academic theories. Gap years and similar sabbatical experiences have long been popular around the world (as can be evidenced below per country) but are just beginning to become more popular in the United States. Studies conducted by American colleges are showing that the average GPA for students who have taken a gap year is significantly higher than the average GPA for students who have not . Amidst much evidence supporting the positive outcomes of taking a gap year, the room for improvement remains – as the gap year experience is largely geared primarily toward students with “means.” Some still argue an opposing view, as parents are among the concerned that taking a year off from school has the potential to break a student’s focus and derail their path rather than recharge it. Ultimately though, the idea of a gap year is growing as it helps students gain the independence necessary for a smoother transition into adulthood.


title: Gap year

text: Gap years first became common in the 1960s where the young, baby boom generation wanted to get away from the severity of war from their parents generation. At first, the primary purpose of the gap year was for countries to exchange cultural ideals in the hope of preventing future wars. The outcome of this exchange was the growth of the gap year industry.


title: Gap year

text: The introduction of gap year companies in the 1960s and 1970s started the gap year industry. With the long-term success of organizations like Topdeck, Flight Centre, and Raleigh International, the gap year industry developed rapidly. In 1967, Nicholas Maclean-Bristol created Project Trust, which sent three volunteers to Ethiopia from the UK. The goal of this was to help the nation develop, but also build the volunteers' own skills. In 1972, Gap Activity Projects (now Lattitude Global Volunteering) was started to send UK youth around the world on Gap Year experiences. Their participants, still called "Gappers", went a long way to branding the year between high school and university as a Gap Year. In 1973, Graham Turner innovated the gap year industry by purchasing a bus and selling tickets to Kathmandu. This led to Turner creating Topdeck and Flight Centre, which are successful gap year companies today. In 1978, the Prince of Wales and Colonel John Blashford-Snell began Operation Drake which what is now known as Raleigh International, an expedition voyage around the world following Sir Francis Drake's route.


title: Gap year

text: In 1969, the first gap year organization was founded in Worcester, Massachusetts. The organization called Dynamy was founded with the intentions of teaching young people self confidence and the role they play in a large community. In the 1980s, the gap year idea was promoted by Cornelius H. Bull in the United States to allow students more time for individual growth. Cornelius saw that students needed a bridge between high school and college that would help develop more hands-on skills. To do this, he founded the Center for Interim Programs in 1980 which had goals of increasing self-awareness and developing new cultural perspectives.


title: Gap year

text: Australians and New Zealanders have a tradition of travelling overseas independently at a young age. In New Zealand this is known as "doing an OE" (Overseas experience). Sometimes this is limited to one year, but at times Australians and New Zealanders will remain overseas for longer, many working short-term in service industry jobs to fund their travels. Europe and Asia are popular destinations for gap year travels. In Australia, exchange programs and youth benefits provide many opportunities for young people to gain experience through travel in a gap year. The Gap Year Association provided approximately four million dollars in 2016 in the form of scholarships and need based grants.


title: Gap year

text: The Time Credit system in Belgium entitles employees to one year per lifetime of absence from their job, in order to prevent burn-out and to provide an opportunity to pursue other important things in life.


title: Gap year

text: In Denmark during the late 1990s the percentage of students continuing their education directly after high school was down to 25%. Along with this drop there was a rise in the number of students enrolling and graduating within ten years of finishing high school. Data also shows that women in Denmark take more gap years than men. In 2018, a record low of 15% of that year's high school graduates had chosen to continue their education directly after graduation.


title: Gap year

text: Denmark has sought to limit the number of students who take a year out, penalizing students who delay their education to travel abroad or work full-time. In 2006, it was announced that fewer students than before had taken a year out. In April 2009, the Danish government proposed a new law which gives a bonus to students who refrain from a year out.


title: Gap year

text: In Ghana, most senior high school leavers have a year out from August to the August of the following year, although this is not mandatory.


title: Gap year

text: In Israel, it is customary for young adults who have completed their mandatory military service to engage in backpacker tourism abroad in groups before starting university or full-time work (, "post-army trip").


title: Gap year

text: Israel has also become a popular gap year travel destination for thousands of young Jewish adults from abroad each year. There are over 10,000 participants in the Masa Israel Journey gap year annually.


title: Gap year

text: The employment practice known as simultaneous recruiting of new graduates matches students with jobs before graduation, meaning sabbaticals are highly unusual in Japan.


title: Gap year

text: While unusual, gap years in Japan are not completely unheard of. Some students will take a gap year or two to readjust or reassess their career path or school of choice if not accepted into the school they had originally hoped for.


title: Gap year

text: While waiting for their JAMB result after secondary school, Nigerian youths usually learn a trade or skill, or enroll for another academic program (remedial, pre-degree, JUPEB, A-levels, IJMB, etc.) to increase their chances of getting into a university.


title: Gap year

text: It is quite normal in Norway to have a gap year between high school and further education or job. Some join the military as part of the compulsory military service, some takes part in Folkehøyskole (Folk high school) and some are combining work (typically work that requires no formal education, such as cashiers and waiters) with travelling or volunteer work. It is also fairly common to study language in another country, for instance Spain, France or Australia.


title: Gap year

text: Similar to the way that some students travel during a gap year, many Romanian and Bulgarian students instead study abroad and in recent years the number of students who choose to do this has been growing.


title: Gap year

text: In the Republic of South Africa, taking a year off is common for those in more affluent classes. School leavers often travel abroad to gain life experience. It is not uncommon for gap year students to travel to Cape Town for life experience. Common volunteer opportunities include working in animal welfare or tree planting.


title: Gap year

text: In the United Kingdom, the practice of taking a gap year – seen as an interim period of 7 or 8 months between completing secondary education and starting university – began to develop in the 1970s. The period was seen as a time for gaining life experience through travel or volunteering. Universities appear to welcome post-gap-year applicants on the same basis as those going straight to university from previous education.


title: Gap year

text: The number of students aged 18 opting to defer their university place in order to take a gap year reached a peak of 21,020 in 2008. This figure crashed to 7,320 in 2011 – a year before the introduction of greatly increased tuition fees by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. Deferrals in 2016 were near their peak again although Year Out Group states its members now take more bookings from students outside the UK. Shorter gap style experiences (volunteering, expeditions, courses and work placements) are gaining in popularity, as they can be taken without the need to take a full year out of study or work.


title: Gap year

text: In the United States, the practice of taking a "year off" remains the exception, but is gaining in popularity. Parents are starting to encourage their high school graduates to take a gap year to focus on service opportunities. Schools are also beginning to support gap years more; most notably Harvard University and Princeton University, are now encouraging students to take time off, and some have even built gap year-like programs into the curriculum, and many high schools now have counsellors specifically for students interested in taking a gap year.


title: Gap year

text: Taking a year off has recently become slightly more common for Americans, a main reason being that students often feel burnt out with schooling and want to take time to make sure their lives are headed in a direction that suits them. Some 40,000 Americans participated in 2013 in sabbatical programs, an increase of almost 20% since 2006, according to statistics compiled by the American Gap Association. Universities such as Georgetown University, New York University, Amherst College, Princeton University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Middlebury College, Davidson College, Yeshiva University, and Reed College have formal policies allowing students to defer admission.


title: Gap year

text: Tufts University offers a program called 1+4 which allows students from lower income families to volunteer abroad or within America for a period of one year before starting their bachelor's degree. Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, is the first U.S. university to fully integrate the gap year into a four-year undergraduate degree, which makes financial aid directly available to any student considering a gap year.


title: Gap year

text: Some formal gap year programs can cost as much as $30,000, but cheaper alternatives are becoming more widely available; some reduce costs by offering room and board. For example, the National Civilian Community Corps, an AmeriCorps program, offers 18- to 24-year-olds (no age limit for Team Leaders) an all-expense-paid gap year (room & board, meals, transportation, etc.) in exchange for a 10-month commitment to National and Community service. AmeriCorps NCCC members travel the country in diverse teams and perform a variety of tasks such as rebuilding trails in national parks, responding to natural disasters or working as mentors for disadvantaged youths. As with most AmeriCorps programs, service members receive an education award of approximately $6,000 upon completion of their service that can be used toward qualified educational expenses or student loans. The zero cost to the member model AmeriCorps offers makes it an attractive alternative to costly gap year programs while leveraging taxpayer dollars to strengthen American communities.


title: Gap year

text: Additionally, new federal partnerships such as FEMA Corps offer traditional gap year seekers an immersive professional and team building experience that can serve as a launch pad for their careers. Some government programs designed to help students afford college prohibit students from taking a gap year. For example, the Tennessee Promise program requires that students must "Attend full-time and continuously at an eligible postsecondary institution as defined in T.C.A. § 49-4-708 in the fall term immediately following graduation or attainment of a GED or HiSET diploma; except that a student enrolling in a Tennessee College of Applied Technology (TCAT) may enroll in the summer prior to the fall term." Malia Obama, daughter of former President Barack Obama, took a gap year before attending Harvard University in the fall of 2017. Universities such as Harvard and Princeton are encouraging students to take a Gap year. This time that is taken off can be beneficial so students don't "burn out" or partake in indulging behaviors that promote unhealthy stress.


title: Gap year

text: In Venezuela, gap year students have gone to leadership courses in Israel, postgraduate years at elite US schools, tutorial colleges in the UK, work internships, language centers across the globe, and exploration gap years in remote countries. Today, the practice has become more widespread and Venezuela is a major economic contributor to the gap year. They are also major contributors in the college studies and English studies industries, especially in countries such as Ireland.


title: Gap year

text: In Yemen, a gap year is mandatory between secondary school (high school) and university. Unless one attends a private university, they must wait one year after secondary school before applying to university. Until the nineties it was mandatory for male graduates to go to the army for one year, and to teach in a school or work in a hospital for female graduates (and for men who cannot join the army for health reasons).


title: Novelty song

text: A novelty song is a type of song built upon some form of novel concept, such as a gimmick, a piece of humor, or a sample of popular culture. Novelty songs partially overlap with comedy songs, which are more explicitly based on humor, and with musical parody, especially when the novel gimmick is another popular song. Novelty songs achieved great popularity during the 1920s and 1930s. They had a resurgence of interest in the 1950s and 1960s. The term arose in Tin Pan Alley to describe one of the major divisions of popular music; the other two divisions were ballads and dance music. Humorous songs, or those containing humorous elements, are not necessarily novelty songs.


title: Novelty song

text: Novelty songs are often a parody or humor song, and may apply to a current event such as a holiday or a fad such as a dance or TV programme. Many use unusual lyrics, subjects, sounds, or instrumentation, and may not even be musical. For example, the 1966 novelty song "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!", by Napoleon XIV, has little music and is set to a rhythm tapped out on a snare drum, a tambourine, and the bare sides of the musicians' legs.


title: Novelty song

text: A book on achieving an attention-grabbing novelty single is "The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way)", written by The KLF. It is based on their achievement of a UK number-one single with "Doctorin' the Tardis", a 1988 dance remix mashup of the "Doctor Who" theme music released under the name of 'The Timelords'. It argued that (at the time) achieving a number one single could be achieved less by musical talent than through market research, sampling and gimmicks matched to an underlying danceable groove.


title: Novelty song

text: Novelty songs were a major staple of Tin Pan Alley from its start in the late 19th century. They continued to proliferate in the early years of the 20th century, some rising to be among the biggest hits of the era. Varieties included songs with an unusual gimmick, such as the stuttering in "K-K-K-Katy" or the playful boop-boop-a-doops of "I Wanna Be Loved By You", which made a star out of Helen Kane and inspired the creation of Betty Boop; silly lyrics like "Yes! We Have No Bananas"; playful songs with a bit of double entendre, such as "Don't Put a Tax on All the Beautiful Girls"; and invocations of foreign lands with emphasis on general feel of exoticism rather than geographic or anthropological accuracy, such as "Oh By Jingo!", "The Sheik of Araby", and "The Yodeling Chinaman". These songs were perfect for the medium of Vaudeville, and performers such as Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker became well known for such songs.


title: Novelty song

text: Zez Confrey's 1920s instrumental compositions, which involved gimmicky approaches (such as "Kitten on the Keys") or maniacally rapid tempos ("Dizzy Fingers"), were popular enough to start a fad of novelty piano pieces that lasted through the decade. The fad was brought about by the increasing availability of audio recordings by way of the player piano and the phonograph; whereas much of Tin Pan Alley's repertoire was sold in the form of sheet music and thus had to be simple enough for an amateur pianist to play, novelty piano brought "virtuoso"-level performance to the home and to those who would not normally attend classical concerts.


title: Novelty song

text: At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, "Hitler Has Only Got One Ball" (set to the tune of British Army bandmaster F. J. Ricketts’s popular World War Iera "Colonel Bogey March") was sung by British troops. A 1940s novelty song was Spike Jones' 1942 "Der Fuehrer's Face", which included raspberries in its chorus. Tex Williams's "Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)" topped the "Billboard" best-sellers chart for six weeks and the country music chart for 16 weeks in 1947 and 1948. Hank Williams Sr.'s "Move It On Over", his first hit song, has some humor and novelty elements (about a man having to share the doghouse when his lover kicks him out of the house), but contemporaries (among them Jerry Rivers) disputed this and noted that many men had been faced with eviction under similar circumstances. The 1953 #1 single "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?" became notable both for its extensive airplay and the backlash from listeners who found it increasingly annoying. Satirists such as Stan Freberg, Allan Sherman, and Tom Lehrer used novelty songs to poke fun at contemporary pop culture in the 1950s and early 1960s.


title: Novelty song

text: In 1951, Frank Sinatra was paired in a CBS television special with TV personality Dagmar. Mitch Miller at Columbia Records became intrigued with the pairing and compelled songwriter Dick Manning to compose a song for the two of them. The result was "Mama Will Bark", a novelty song performed by Sinatra with interspersed spoken statements by Dagmar, saying things like "mama will bark", "mama will spank", and "papa will spank". The recording even includes the sound of a dog yowling. It is regarded by both music scholars and Sinatra enthusiasts to be perhaps the worst song he ever recorded. Sinatra would record few others before he left Columbia and joined Capitol Records in 1952.


title: Novelty song

text: Dickie Goodman faced a lawsuit for his 1956 novelty song "The Flying Saucer", which sampled snippets of contemporary hits without permission and arranged them to resemble interviews with an alien landing on Earth. Goodman released more hit singles in the same vein for the next two decades including his gold record RIAA certified hit "Mr. Jaws" in 1975, which charted #1 in "Cash Box" and "Record World" and was based on the movie "Jaws".


title: Novelty song

text: Among the more far out songs of this genre were the two released in 1956 by Nervous Norvus, "Transfusion" and "Ape Call".


title: Novelty song

text: The Coasters had novelty songs such as "Charlie Brown" and "Yakety Yak". "Yakety Yak" became a #1 single on July 21, 1958, and is the only novelty song (#346) included in the Songs of the Century. "Lucky Ladybug" by Billy and Lillie was popular in December 1958. Lonnie Donegan's 1959 cover of the 1924 novelty song "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight?)" was a transatlantic hit, reaching #5 on the "Billboard" charts two years after its release; it was one of the earliest top-5 hits to come from the United Kingdom in the rock era, preceding the British Invasion.


title: Novelty song

text: Three songs using a sped-up recording technique became #1 hits in the United States in 1958–59: David Seville's "Witch Doctor" and Ragtime Cowboy Joe, Sheb Wooley's "The Purple People Eater", and Seville's "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)", which used a speeded-up voice technique to simulate three chipmunks' voices. The technique (which Dickie Goodman had also used on "The Flying Saucer") would inspire a number of other knockoffs, including The Nutty Squirrels and Russ Regan's one-off group Dancer, Prancer and Nervous.


title: Novelty song

text: In 1960, 16-year-old Brian Hyland had a novelty hit with the song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini", by Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss, which topped the "Billboard" single chart. The Trashmen reached the top 5 with "Surfin' Bird", a surf rock medley of two novelty songs originally recorded by The Rivingtons. In 1964, the Grammy for Best Country and Western Album was awarded to Roger Miller. Miller was known to sing novelty songs.


title: Novelty song

text: In 1965, "A Windmill in Old Amsterdam", a song written by Ted Dicks and Myles Rudge, became a UK hit for Ronnie Hilton. The song spent a total of 13 weeks on the UK Singles Chart peaking at No. 23 in the chart of 17 February 1965. The song's composers were granted an Ivor Novello Award in 1966 for the Year's Outstanding Novelty Composition.


title: Novelty song

text: Chuck Berry's "My Ding-a-Ling" reached #1 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 in 1972, and Ray Stevens, known for such novelty hits as "Ahab the Arab", "Gitarzan", and "Mississippi Squirrel Revival", had a #1 hit with "The Streak" in 1974. Comedy act Cheech & Chong recorded a number of musical bits that can be classified as novelty songs, including "Basketball Jones"(1973) and "Earache My Eye" (1974). Warren Zevon's lone chart hit was the novelty number "Werewolves of London". Other novelty songs in the '70s are Jimmy Castor Bunch "King Kong"(1975), Rick Dees' "Disco Duck" (1976) and The Fools' "Psycho Chicken" (1978). "Weird Al" Yankovic would emerge as one of the most prolific parody acts of all time in the 1980s, with a career that would span four decades; he would join Cliff Richard in being one of the few acts to have at least one top-40 hit in the U.S. in four consecutive decades (1950s through the 1980s for Richard, 1980s to 2010s for Yankovic).


title: Novelty song

text: Randy Brooks wrote a Christmas novelty song and it was originally recorded by then husband-wife recording duo Elmo Shropshire and his wife Patsy in 1979, called "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer". It tells the tragic-comic story of a family grandmother who meets her end on Christmas Eve. After having drunk too much eggnog and forgetting to take her medicine, she staggers out of her family's house late Christmas Eve, is run over by Santa Claus' entourage, and found trampled at the scene the next morning. It has become a staple of Christmas music playlists on American radio since its original release.


title: Novelty song

text: An underground novelty music scene began to emerge in the 1960s, beginning with the homosexually themed songs of Camp Records and the racist humor of Johnny Rebel, then in the 1970s and 1980s with X-rated albums by David Allan Coe and Clarence "Blowfly" Reid.


title: Novelty song

text: Novelty songs have been popular in the UK as well. In 1991, "The Stonk" novelty song raised over £100,000 for the Comic Relief charity. In 1993, "Mr Blobby" became the second novelty song to reach the coveted Christmas number one slot in the UK, following Benny Hill's 1971 chart-topper "Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)". Many popular children's TV characters would try to claim the Christmas number one spot after this. In 1997, the Teletubbies who reached number one the previous week failed to gain it with their single "Say Eh-oh!". They came second in the charts to The Spice Girls second of three consecutive Christmas number ones, with "Too Much". Later on at the turn of the millennium, Bob the Builder was successful in achieving a Christmas number one in 2000, with "Can We Fix It?". However, Bob the Builder did have another number one single a year later with a cover of Lou Bega's "Mambo No.5", and also had another less successful single in 2008 with "Big Fish Little Fish".


title: Novelty song

text: Some novelty music draws its appeal from its unintentional novelty; so-called "outsider musicians" with little or no formal musical training often will produce comical results (see for instance, Florence Foster Jenkins, Mrs. Miller, the Portsmouth Sinfonia, The Shaggs, and William Hung).


title: Novelty song

text: After the fictitious composer P.D.Q. Bach repeatedly won the "Best Comedy Album" Grammy from 1990 to 1993, the category was changed to "Best "Spoken" Comedy Album". When "Best Comedy Album" was reinstated in 2004, "Weird Al" Yankovic won for "Poodle Hat".


title: Novelty song

text: Novelty songs were popular on U.S. radio throughout the 1970s and 1980s, to the point where it was not uncommon for novelty songs to break into the top 40. Freeform and album-oriented rock stations made use of novelty songs; some of the best-known work from progressive rocker Frank Zappa, for instance, is his extensive body of mostly adult-oriented novelty music. Zappa's "Bobby Brown (Goes Down)" was a smash hit in Europe despite its sexually explicit storyline, and Valley Girl was a Top 40 hit in the US, while his "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow" and "Dancin' Fool" also reached the top 100 in his native United States. Beginning in 1970, Dr. Demento's nationally syndicated radio show gave novelty songs an outlet for much of the country; this lasted through the mid-2000s, when the show (mirroring trends in the genre) faded in popularity until its terrestrial cancellation in June 2010.


title: Novelty song

text: In the 21st century, novelty songs found a new audience online; the hit song "The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)" by Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis was featured on the kids compilation album "So Fresh Pop Party 13" in 2014. Likewise, rapper Big Shaq's 2017 hit "Man's Not Hot", which depicts a man who refuses to take off his jacket, received widespread attention and inspired countless memes as a result of its success, with the man behind the song being British comedian Michael Dapaah. The children's novelty song "Baby Shark" received widespread attention when Korean education brand Pinkfong's cover version from an online viral video reached the top 40 in the U.S. and several other countries.


title: Novelty song

text: In the United Kingdom, the novelty hit has mainly become a feature of the "Christmas chart battle" (apart from a few viral hits found earlier in a year), with novelty act LadBaby reaching Number One four times in a row, with all four songs being parodies of other popular songs reworked to incorporate a running gag that revolves around sausage rolls. More often than not, the UK Christmas novelty records were recorded for charity, with LadBaby's Christmas chart rivals in 2020 also including The Dancing Binmen (Jack Johnson, Henry Wright and Adrian Breakwell) with their song "Boogie Round The Bins At Christmas Time", and "Merry Christmas, Baked Potato" from comedian Matt Lucas, with fellow chart contender "Raise The Woof!" being promoted as the first ever Christmas record for dogs.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Michael Mahon Hastings (January 28, 1980 – June 18, 2013) was an American journalist, author, contributing editor to "Rolling Stone" and reporter for BuzzFeed. He was raised in New York, Canada, and Vermont, and he attended New York University. Hastings rose to prominence with his coverage of the Iraq War for "Newsweek" in the 2000s. After his fiancée Andrea Parhamovich was killed in an ambush, Hastings wrote his first book, "I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story" (2008), a memoir about his relationship with Parhamovich and the insurgency that took her life.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: He received the George Polk Award for "The Runaway General" (2010), a "Rolling Stone" profile of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the Afghanistan war. The article documented the widespread contempt for civilian government officials exhibited by the general and his staff and ultimately resulted in McChrystal's resignation. Hastings followed up with "The Operators" (2012), a detailed account of his monthlong stay with McChrystal in Europe and Afghanistan.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Hastings became a vocal critic of the Obama administration, Democratic Party, and surveillance state during the 2013 Department of Justice investigations of reporters, referring to restrictions of freedom of the press as a "war" on journalism. His last story, "Why Democrats Love to Spy On Americans", was published by BuzzFeed on June 7, 2013.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Hastings died in an automobile crash on June 18, 2013, in Los Angeles, California. Blue Rider Press published his only novel, "The Last Magazine" (2014), a year after his death.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Born in Malone, New York, Michael was the son of Molly (née Mahon) and Brent Hastings. Hastings had two brothers, Jon and Jeff. Hastings lived in Malone until he was 11 years old. His family then moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where his mother was trained in the field of pediatric ophthalmology at McGill University. He attended Lower Canada College, a private preparatory high school in Montreal, where he wrote a column for the school's paper.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: When he was 16, his family relocated to Vermont. He attended Rice Memorial High School, a Roman Catholic secondary school in South Burlington, Vermont. In high school Hastings was elected as class president, where he ran on an "anti-administration platform". He played lacrosse and soccer, and performed in the school's plays before graduating in 1998. After graduating, Hastings wrote for "Scholastic", an educational magazine for young adults. He attended Connecticut College before earning his Bachelor of Arts in journalism from New York University in 2002.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Hastings married journalist Elise Jordan in May 2011 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Jordan was a speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2008 to 2009.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Hastings began his journalism career as an unpaid intern for "Newsweek" magazine in 2002, and he was also a regular contributor to "Gentlemen's Quarterly" and a contributing editor at "Rolling Stone" magazine.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: In 2005, Hastings began covering the Iraq War while living in NATO-occupied Green Zones in Baghdad. Hastings suffered the loss of his fiancée Andrea Parhamovich in 2007. A former spokeswoman for Air America, Parhamovich moved to Baghdad and began working for the National Democratic Institute. She died after her convoy was ambushed by gunmen, killing Parhamovich and her three security guards. Hastings wrote a book on the incident, titled "I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story". Shortly before its publication, "Newsweek" published an excerpt of the book, in which Hastings recounts the day Parhamovich died. The "New York Times" gave the book a mixed review.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: In June 2010, "Rolling Stone" published "The Runaway General", Hastings's profile of U.S. Army general Stanley McChrystal, then commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the Afghanistan war. The article reported remarks by McChrystal's staff that were overtly critical and contemptuous of White House staff and other civilian officials. On June 22, news of the forthcoming article reached the attention of the American print media and the White House. McChrystal immediately issued an extensive apology, and Duncan Boothby, the civilian contractor responsible for coordinating the article with Hastings, resigned. U.S. President Barack Obama summoned McChrystal to the White House on June 23, and relieved him of command. Hastings offered his views on relations between McChrystal and the Obama administration.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Hastings was originally meant to have controlled contact, which expanded when he had to catch a bus to Berlin with the general and his entourage after international flights were grounded, because of the air travel disruptions caused by the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull, which gave him sufficient time to pick up less discreet remarks. How Hastings got access to McChrystal's inner circles is detailed in a "Newsweek" article. "The Huffington Post" named Hastings a 2010 Game Changer for his reporting, along with Matt Taibbi of "Rolling Stone". Hastings was awarded a Polk Award for his reporting.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Hastings and Eric Bates, executive editor of "Rolling Stone", repeatedly defended the accuracy of Hastings's article about McChrystal. In July 2010, the U.S. Army launched its own investigation into whether McChrystal and his team were insubordinate, and concluded that the most inflammatory comments were made by an officer in the Navy Special Warfare Group, according to "The New York Times". This was later confirmed in Hastings's book about the war in Afghanistan that was published in January 2012, "The Operators", which attributed a number of damning quotes to Lt. Commander Dave Silverman, now CEO of the McChrystal Group. A subsequent Pentagon investigation challenged the accuracy of Hastings's article "The Runaway General" which anonymously quoted people around McChrystal making disparaging remarks about members of President Obama's national security team, including Vice President Joe Biden. The report from the inquiry states "In some instances, we found no witness who acknowledged making or hearing the comments as reported. In other instances, we confirmed that the general substance of an incident at issue occurred, but not in the exact context described in the article." In response, "Rolling Stone" stated, "The report by the Pentagon's inspector general offers no credible sourceor indeed, any named sourcecontradicting the facts as reported in our story, 'The Runaway General.'"


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: In an interview with Matt Lauer of NBC's "Today" show on June 23, 2011, Hastings said "I did not think Gen. McChrystal would be fired. In fact, I thought his position was basically untouchable, I thought it would give them a headache for maybe 72 hours".


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: In February 2011, Hastings wrote a lengthy article profiling McChrystal's successor, General David Petraeus, and detailing Petraeus's strategy for the war.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: In January 2012, Hastings published "The Operators", a book that details his travels with General Stanley McChrystal and his team in April 2010. It included extensive quotations from over 20 hours of audio recordings of McChrystal and his inner circle. "The Daily Beast" called it a "book of great consequence... "The Operators" seems destined to join the pantheon of great GWOT literature". Reviewer Mark Moyar slammed the book in


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: "The Wall Street Journal" writing, "In contrast to many of the other correspondents covering Afghanistan, Mr. Hastings has not invested the effort required to comprehend the war's complexities." However, the "Journal" failed to disclose that Mark Moyar was a consultant for the U.S. military, who worked for General Petraeus and General Caldwell. The book became a "New York Times" bestseller.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Hastings recounted conversations with some of McChrystal's staff members in the book, when during a party at which everyone was "totally shit faced", one asked him, "You're not going to fuck us, are you?" and another stating, "We'll hunt you down and kill you if we don't like what you write". Hastings interpreted the drunken comments as a joke.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: "Panic 2012: The Sublime and Terrifying Inside Story of Obama's Final Campaign" was released as a downloadable e-book on popular formats and recounted Hasting's follies for access along President Barack Obama's incumbent race for re-election. The account notably includes a profile of press secretary Jay Carney, describing Carney as having "a serious, $10,000-a-day habit of following presidents around the country and the world", along with a published feud with White House aide Philippe Reines, a post-election spat with Rahm Emanuel, and other attempts of gaining deeper access. The script was published by Penguin/Blue Rider Press on January 5, 2013.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: In February 2012, in partnership with WikiLeaks, Hastings and "Rolling Stone" reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had been keeping tabs on the Occupy Wall Street movement. An October 2011 report named "Special Coverage: Occupy Wall Street," the DHS wrote that "mass gatherings associated with public protest movements can have disruptive effects on transportation, commercial, and government services, especially when staged in major metropolitan areas." Hastings criticized the DHS report, which concluded, "The continued expansion of these protests also places an increasingly heavy burden on law enforcement and movement organizers to control protesters."


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: In June 2012, Hastings wrote an article about the struggles of Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, who was captured by the Taliban when he walked off his Army base in Afghanistan in 2009 after being disillusioned with the war.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: In an interview with MSNBC anchor Alex Wagner, Hastings discussed his article and said, "There are elements within the Pentagon who don't want to make the trade for Bowe Bergdahl".


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: A White House official subsequently responded to these allegations by informing Hastings that "details of Sergeant Bergdahl's capture are irrelevant". Bowe Bergdahl was traded for five Taliban prisoners in June 2014.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Hastings was a longtime critic of the U.S. drone program. In May 2013, Hastings denounced President Barack Obama's foreign policy and use of drones as an embrace of Bush-era neoconservatism and "total militarism." Hastings said that Obama "enshrines killing people and spying on journalists as the two major tenets of his national-security state." During the discussion, Hastings said that MSNBC contributor Perry Bacon, Jr., was acting as a "stenographer" for the White House.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: On June 18, 2013, Hastings died in a single-vehicle automobile crash in his Mercedes-Benz C250 Coupé at approximately 4:25 a.m. in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. A witness to the crash said the car seemed to be traveling at maximum speed and was creating sparks and flames before it fishtailed and crashed into a palm tree. Video from a nearby security camera reportedly shows Hastings's vehicle speeding and bursting into flames.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Witnesses described the car's engine being ejected 50 to 60 yards (46–55 m) from the scene. Hastings's body was burned beyond recognition. The coroner identified the body by matching fingerprints with those the FBI had on file. Two days after the crash, the Los Angeles Police Department declared that there were no signs of foul play. The coroner's report ruled the death to be an accident. An autopsy showed that the cause of death was massive blunt force trauma consistent with a high-speed crash.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: In an interview with writer Ray Sawhill, Hastings's older brother, Jonathan Hastings, recounts how he had flown to L.A. to help his brother shortly before the accident because he had "got the impression that he was having a manic episode, similar to one he had had 15 years ago...", at which time "drugs had been involved..." After failing to convince his brother to check voluntarily into a drug rehabilitation program, or fly back to Vermont to stay with family, he started making plans with his other brother to attempt to "force Mike into checking himself into a hospital or detox center." However, before that could be arranged, "he snuck out [of the apartment] on me when I was sleeping." and had crashed shortly afterward. When asked directly whether his brother might have died from some sort of foul play, Jonathan responded "I really rule out foul play entirely. I might have been suspicious if I hadn't been with him the day before he died. After all, he definitely was investigating and writing about a lot of sensitive subjects. But based on being with him and talking to people who were worried about him in the weeks leading up to his death, and being around him when he had had similar problems when he was younger, I was pretty much convinced that he wasn't in danger from any outside agency."


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Hastings was eulogized in the media by figures such as Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, his co-workers at BuzzFeed, and others.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism Richard A. Clarke said that what is known about the crash is "consistent with a car cyber attack." He was quoted as saying: "There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers—including the United States—know how to remotely seize control of a car. So if there were a cyber attack on [Hastings's] car — and I'm not saying there was, I think whoever did it would probably get away with it."


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: The day before the crash, Hastings indicated that he believed he was being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In an email to colleagues, which was copied to and released by Hastings's friend Army Staff Sergeant Joe Biggs, Hastings said that he was "onto a big story", that he needed to "go off the radar", and that the FBI might interview them. WikiLeaks announced that Hastings had also contacted Jennifer Robinson, one of his lawyers, a few hours prior to the crash, and the "LA Weekly" reported that he was preparing new reports on the CIA at the time of his death.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: The FBI released a statement denying that Hastings was ever under investigation by the agency. According to the alternative newspaper "LA Weekly", his neighbor Jordanna Thigpen said that Hastings came to her apartment after midnight and urgently asked to borrow her Volvo, saying he was afraid to drive his own car. However, Thigpen declined.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: "Motor Trend" technical director Frank Markus said that the ensuing fire was consistent with a high-speed car crash.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: There are conflicting opinions as to Hastings's death. After his death, some media outlets recalled that Hastings said he had received death threats from the military after the McChrystal article.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: Cenk Uygur, a friend of Hastings's and host of "The Young Turks", told KTLA that many of Michael's friends were concerned that he was "in a very agitated state", saying he was "incredibly tense" and worried that his material was being surveilled by the government. Friends believed that Michael's line of work led to a "paranoid state." "USA Today" reported that in the days before his death, Hastings believed his car was being "tampered with" and that he was scared and wanted to leave town.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: The possibility of a conspiracy or some sort of government involvement in Hastings's death has been discounted by members of his own family, who were with him around the time of his death. Hastings's widow, Elise Jordan, has said she believes his death to be "just a really tragic accident." Other members of his family have stated that they were concerned at the time that he was a danger to himself from his erratic behavior. His older brother Jonathan had just flown to L.A., attempting to organize some sort of family intervention for what he believed was a drug-induced "manic episode", a concern apparently echoed by others close to him at that time.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: The and its attachments (totaling 21 pages) were released to the public on September 24, 2013, after investigative journalist Jason Leopold and MIT doctoral candidate Ryan Shapiro filed a joint suit in July 2013 against the FBI for ignoring their FOIA requests for the file. The FBI failed to respond to the requests within the allotted 20-day period. On August 15, Leopold released a statement that read, "The Department of Justice (DOJ) has indicated that the FBI has likely located responsive records pertaining to investigative journalist Michael Hastings." Al Jazeera, along with Shapiro, released results from a FOIA request showing that the FBI's Washington field office had opened a file on Hastings in June 2012 to store "unclassified media articles" and "memorialize controversial reporting by "Rolling Stone" magazine on June 7, 2012." The attorney who filed the FOIA lawsuit, Jeff Light, suggested that it was uncommon for the FBI to open such files on reporters.


title: Michael Hastings (journalist)

text: In 2017, "The Daily Beast" announced it had posted one of Hastings's quotes on the walls of their office: "There are three great beats in American journalism: politics, Hollywood, and war." During an MSNBC broadcast, Rachel Maddow paid tribute to Hastings after his death, saying: "Michael was angry; he was also loving and thoughtful and constructive and brilliant, but he was angry about things that weren't right in the world . . . with war and with loss, and that drove his reporting, and it made him fearless when he realized he had found something important that he could report."


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: Abu Mohammed Abubakar al-Sheikawi (also known by the alias "Darul Akeem wa Zamunda Tawheed", or "Darul Tawheed"; "the abode of monotheism"; born 1965, 1969 or 1975 – 19 May 2021) was a Kanuri man known as the leader of Boko Haram, a Nigerian Islamist militant group. He served as deputy leader to the group's founder, Mohammed Yusuf, until Yusuf was executed in 2009.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: Nigerian authorities believed that Shekau was killed in 2009 during clashes between security forces and Boko Haram until July 2010, when Shekau appeared in a video claiming leadership of the group. He has subsequently been regularly reported dead and was thought to use doubles. In March 2015, Shekau pledged allegiance to ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Shekau was a Salafi, until 2016, when he ended his relation to ISIL.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: On 21 May 2021, an investigation by "The Wall Street Journal", backed by recent reports by Nigerian officials, stated that Shekau killed himself by detonating a suicide vest. Shekau's rival Abu Musab al-Barnawi later also stated that Shekau had killed himself. In June 2021, his death was confirmed by his surviving loyalists.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: Shekau was born in Shekau town, in Tarmuwa local government, Yobe State; his exact date of birth is unknown but is said to be between 1965 and 1975. Shekau was an ethnic Kanuri, and also spoke Hausa, Fulani, Arabic, and English. He was said to have had a photographic memory.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: Shekau's leadership did not go unchallenged. He received a letter from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb giving him advice but he did not heed it. As a result of his erratic leadership, in 2012 a faction of the group broke off to form Jamaat Ansar al-Muslimin fi Bilād as-Sudn (Ansaru). This faction included his military commander Abu Muhammad al-Bauchawi, and religious advisor Sheikh Abu Osama al-Ansari Muhammad Awal al-Gombawi. Despite this, many soldiers and commanders stayed with Shekau, including military commanders Abu Sa'ad al-Bamawi and Muhammad Salafi. With his group mostly intact, Shekau engaged in conflict with Ansaru, killing their leader Abu Osama al-Ansari. As a result of this, and other arrests of Ansaru leaders by the Nigerian government, Ansaru did not pose a further threat to Shekau's leadership of the jihadi movement in Nigeria, and the group became defunct by 2015.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: Shekau's fellow jihadist fighters were undisciplined and abused the populations they encountered, resulting in the establishment of civilian militias such as the Civilian Joint Task Force to fight them. Shekau was also thought to have killed his own religious advisors, including Sheikh Abd al-Malek al-Ansari al-Kadunawi and Abu al-Abbas al-Bankiwani.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: In June 2012, the United States Department of State designated Shekau as a terrorist and effectively froze his assets in the United States. Since June 2013, the Department has had a standing reward of US$7 million for information leading to Shekau's capture through its Rewards for Justice program. In addition, the Nigerian army has offered a ₦50 million reward (approximately US$300,000) for Shekau.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: In videos Shekau posted online, he boasted often about his invincibility; mocked various armies; and stated that he "cannot be stopped" and "cannot die except by the will of Allah". He has also boasted of being in possession of armoured tanks and other combat vehicles. His online videos frequently depict anti-American rhetoric, and he has made multiple threats to attack the U.S.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: In one prominent incident, he took credit for the kidnapping of over 200 school girls in April 2014. Shekau also announced that the kidnapped girls have been converted to Islam. He has claimed to be waging a jihad against Christianity.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: With the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria during 2014 and 2015, Shekau faced pressure from his commanders and soldiers to pledge his allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. A history of the group says that Shekau "was compelled to give allegiance, and that was through a coming together of the military commanders, and after he became convinced that the matter was about to go out of his hand, and that his throne would be shaken and emptied of him if he did not give allegiance". In August 2016, ISIL appointed Abu Musab al-Barnawi as the leader of the group in place of Shekau. Shekau refused to recognise Barnawi's authority and split off part of the group under its original name of Jamaat Ahlus Sunnah li Dawah wal Jihad, while Barnawi led the "Islamic State's West Africa Province" (ISWAP). While Shekau led his group, he only had 1,500 soldiers, whereas Barnawi had 3,500. Shekau has been widely denounced as following the ideology of the Khawarij by the Islamic State and West Africa province in Nigeria.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: Following the split, many clashes occurred between Shekau and Barnawi's forces over the next years. Regardless, Shekau never fully renounced his allegiance to the Islamic State, instead framing the rebel infighting as being solely attributable to his local rivals.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: Shekau was reported killed in 2009 but reappeared as the group leader less than a year later. The Nigerian army in mid-August 2013 stated that he was fatally wounded when soldiers raided a base of Boko Haram in Sambisa forest and had died between 25 July and 3 August. However, a video in September 2013 was released in which a man purported to be Shekau claimed he had not been killed. The Nigerian army also stated to have killed him during the 2014 Battle of Kodunga that lasted from 12 to 14 September. The Cameroonian military posted a photo and also claimed that their forces killed Shekau in September 2014. In response to these reports, security analyst Ryan Cummings commented, "Is this his fourth or fifth death? He dies more often than an iPhone battery." In early October 2014, a video was obtained by AFP news agency that showed Shekau alive, in which he mocked the Nigerian military's allegations that he had been killed.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: Chadian President Idriss Déby claimed in mid-August 2015 that Shekau had been replaced by Mahamat Daoud without exactly specifying his fate. An audio message attributed to Shekau was released a few days later, in which he purportedly stated that he had neither been killed nor ousted as chief of the group.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: Shekau was reported to have been "fatally wounded" during an airstrike in Taye village on 19 August 2016 by Nigerian Air Force which also killed some senior leaders of Boko Haram. On 25 September, a video of a man purported to be Shekau was released on YouTube, in which he claimed that he was alive and in good health.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: On 27 June 2017, Shekau released a video in which he claimed responsibility for the abduction of Nigerian policewomen and criticized the Nigerian government for claiming that Boko Haram had been defeated. This video would seem to be further evidence of Shekau's continued survival. In February 2020, Shekau released a video threatening the minister of information and digital economy, Isa Ali Pantami, and making reference to what was done to Islamic scholar Ja'afar Mahmud Adam in Maiduguri when he preached against Boko Haram, Bulama Bukarti, explained why Boko Haram leader Shekau threatened the Minister in an interview with the BBC.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: In May 2021, fighting between ISWAP and Shekau's troops escalated. The former invaded Sambisa Forest, Boko Haram's traditional stronghold, and encircled Shekau on 19 May. ISWAP attempted to convince Shekau to surrender and acknowledged Barnawi's authority, but the Boko Haram leader refused. In the middle of the negotiations, Shekau reportedly used a suicide vest to kill himself as well as a senior ISWAP frontline commander who was talking to him at the time. ISWAP was surprised by this "dramatic" action.


title: Abubakar Shekau

text: In the next weeks, several sources gradually issued confirmations of his death. ISWAP declared Shekau dead in early June 2021, with al-Barnawi condemning him as "someone who committed unimaginable terrorism". In mid June, Shekau's loyalists under Bakura Sahalaba confirmed his death, but also declared that they would continue to fight against ISWAP.


title: Peter Egan

text: He is known for his television roles, including Hogarth in "Big Breadwinner Hog", the future George IV of the United Kingdom in "Prince Regent" (1979); smooth neighbour Paul Ryman in the sitcom "Ever Decreasing Circles" (1984–89); and Hugh "Shrimpie" MacClare, Marquess of Flintshire, in "Downton Abbey" (2012–15).


title: Peter Egan

text: Egan was born on 28 September 1946 in Hampstead, London, the son of Doris (née Pick) and Michael Thomas Egan, who is of Irish descent. He was educated at St George's Catholic School, Maida Vale. He also attended the London Oratory School and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.


title: Peter Egan

text: Egan's first stage performance was in "Charlie Girl". His first television role was as the sex-and-cinema-obsessed Seth Starkadder in a BBC serialisation of "Cold Comfort Farm" (1968). In 1969, he had come to notoriety as the acid-throwing gangster Hogarth in the controversial Granada series "Big Breadwinner Hog". Later, he had other starring roles: as John Everett Millais in the BBC serial "The Love School" (1975); as Oscar Wilde in the serial "Lillie" (1978), starring Francesca Annis as Lillie Langtry; as Magnus Pym in the BBC dramatisation of John le Carré's "A Perfect Spy" (1987) and another BBC sitcom, "Joint Account" (1989–90).


title: Peter Egan

text: Egan played the title role in the BBC series "Prince Regent" (1979), and was a sinister immortal Knight Templar in Michael J. Bird's BBC series "The Dark Side of the Sun" (1983). Egan also played Fothergill in the television series "Reilly, Ace of Spies" (1983). In 1986, he had the role of Henry Simcox in the television dramatization of John Mortimer's "Paradise Postponed". In 1988, he narrated the Video 125 drivers eye view 1066DC, which was a cab ride in a Network Southeast class 411 4CEP EMU from Hastings to London. He also guest-starred in episodes of "The Ruth Rendell Mysteries" ("A New Lease of Death," 1991) and "A Touch of Frost" ("Private Lives," 1999).


title: Peter Egan

text: Other roles have included the character Michael Cochrane in the programme "The Ambassador" (1998), and (on film) as the suave secret agent Meres in television spin-off "Callan" (1974), and the Duke of Sutherland in "Chariots of Fire" (1981). In 2007, Egan took the role of Victor in the film "Death at a Funeral". In 2009, he toured as lead Sir Hugo Latymer in Nikolai Foster's revival of Noël Coward's "A Song at Twilight". He is the narrator for the US and UK versions of "Forza Motorsport 3" and its sequel, "Forza Motorsport 4".


title: Peter Egan

text: In 2012, Egan first appeared as Hugh "Shrimpie" MacClare, Marquess of Flintshire, in the Christmas special episode of ITV's "Downton Abbey". For the drama's fifth series, Shrimpie became a recurring character; he also briefly appeared in series six. Later that same year, Egan appeared in Alan Bennett's "People", alongside Frances de la Tour, at the National Theatre.


title: Peter Egan

text: Also in 2012, he narrated a new recording of Rick Wakeman's album, "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", based on the story by Jules Verne.


title: Peter Egan

text: Egan is a longtime animal lover and vegan. Starting in 2010, he began to campaign publicly on behalf of animal rights.


title: Peter Egan

text: Egan is an ambassador for the dog rescue Saving Suffering Strays in Sarajevo, Bosnia. He and his wife Myra adopted their Bosnian dog Tidus from this dog rescue. He continues to give support to stray street dogs of Sarajevo and their lone rescuer Milena Malesevic.


title: Peter Egan

text: Egan is an active ambassador for the Animals Asia Foundation, which is a charity that works to end cruelty to animals in Asia. He is also patron of "All Dogs Matter", a dog rescue and rehoming charity in and around London and Norfolk.


title: Peter Egan

text: In May 2015, Egan became Patron of Chaldon Animal Sanctuary, a charity that offers homes for life for dogs and cats. Egan personally took one of the Bosnian dogs now named Crusoe to the sanctuary in May. Three months later, Egan was announced as patron of the science-based campaign For Life On Earth (FLOE), which fights against animal testing in the field of human medical research.


title: Peter Egan

text: In 2018 Peter Egan joined Animal Equality UK inside a foie gras farm in France to document the process of force-feeding. Since then, he has supported the animal protection organisation on its campaign to ban the import of foie gras made by force-feeding in the UK.


title: Peter Egan

text: Egan was married to former actress Myra Frances for 49 years until her death from cancer on 30 March 2021. His stepdaughter is Rebecca Egan.


title: Lolcat

text: A lolcat (pronounced ), or LOLcat, is an image macro of one or more cats. Lolcat images' idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect text is known as lolspeak.


title: Lolcat

text: Lolcat is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation LOL (laugh out loud) and the word "cat". A synonym for lolcat is cat macro or cat meme, since the images are a type of image macro and also a well-known genre of meme. Lolcats are commonly designed for photo sharing imageboards and other Internet forums.


title: Lolcat

text: British portrait photographer Harry Pointer created a carte de visite series featuring cats posed in various situations in the early 1870s. To these he usually added amusing text intended to further enhance their appeal. Other notable early figures include Harry Whittier Frees and (using mounted animals) Walter Potter.


title: Lolcat

text: The first recorded use of the term "lolcat" was used on 4chan, an anonymous imageboard. The word "Lolcat" was in use as early as June 2006; the domain name codice_1 was registered on June 14, 2006. Their popularity was spread through usage on forums such as Something Awful. "The News Journal" states that "some trace the lolcats back to the site 4chan, which features bizarre cat pictures on Saturdays, or 'Caturdays'." Ikenburg adds that the images have been "slinking around the Internet for years under various labels, but they did not become a sensation until early 2007 with the advent of I Can Has Cheezburger?" The first image on "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?" was posted on January 11, 2007, and was allegedly from the Something Awful website." Lev Grossman of "Time" wrote that the oldest known example "probably dates to 2006", but later corrected himself in a blog post where he recanted his statement based on the anecdotal evidence readers had sent him, placing the origin of "Caturday" and many of the images now known by a few as "lolcats" in early 2005. The domain name "caturday.com" was registered on April 30, 2005.


title: Lolcat

text: The term "lolcat" gained national media attention in the United States when it was covered by "Time", which wrote that non-commercialized phenomena of the sort are increasingly rare, stating that lolcats have "a distinctly old-school, early 1990s, Usenet feel to [them]". "Entertainment Weekly" put them on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "Da cutest distractshun of da decaid? Y, lolcats of corse! We can neber haz enuf of deez capshioned pics of cuddlie kittehs." "Lolcat" was also a runner-up under the "Most Creative" category under the American Dialect Society Word of the Year Awards, losing out to


title: Lolcat

text: In December 2014, the word "lolcat" entered the "Oxford English Dictionary", appearing in its online version.


title: Lolcat

text: Lolcat is a compound word made from "lol" and "cat". "Lol" stands for "Laugh out Loud" or "Laughing out Loud"; hence, lolcats are intended to be funny and to include jokes. Lolcats images comprise a photo of a cat with a large caption characteristically set in a heavy sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black. The image is, on occasion, digitally edited for effect.


title: Lolcat

text: The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the cat, or as a description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and grammar, featuring "conjugated verbs, but a tendency to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar".


title: Lolcat

text: The text parodies the grammar-poor patois stereotypically attributed to Internet slang. Frequently, lolcat captions take the form of phrasal templates. Some phrases have a known source, usually a well-known Internet meme, such as All your base are belong to us or Do not want, while others don't. The language of lolcats has also been likened to baby talk, however it draws on a variety of linguistic resources, not just the imitation of baby talk.


title: Lolcat

text: Common themes include jokes of the form "Im in ur [noun], [verb]-ing ur [related noun]." Many lolcat images capture cats performing characteristically human actions or appearing to use modern technology, such as computers.


title: Lolcat

text: There are several well-known LOLcat images and single-word captions that have spawned many variations and imitations, including "Ceiling Cat" (see below). Others include Fail (a cat with a slice of processed cheese on its face) and "I Can Has Cheezburger" (a portrait of a blue British Shorthair). Another popular format is "[Adjective] cat is [adjective/noun]."


title: Lolcat

text: "Ceiling Cat" is a character spawned by the meme. The original image was an image macro with a picture of a cat looking out of a hole in a ceiling, captioned "Ceiling Cat is watching you masturbate." There followed numerous examples with the format "Ceiling Cat is watching you ["verb" ending in / rhyming with -ate]" with Ceiling Cat superimposed in the upper left hand corner of an image macro depicting the appropriate action. The underlying theme is that the cat is looking down on one, almost in a form of judgment. "Ceiling Cat" and the corresponding "Basement Cat" (a black cat who lives in the basement) represent good and evil in the lolcat universe, and in some cases God and Satan, as in the LOLCat Bible Translation Project. "Ceiling Cat" by Eva & Franco Mattes, a 2016 taxidermy cat installation mimicking the meme, is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.


title: Lolcat

text: Variations on the lolcat concept include captioning photos of other animals in a similar style (e.g. "loldogs" for dogs, etc.).


title: Lolcat

text: The syntax of lolcat captions was used as the basis for LOLCODE, an esoteric programming language with interpreters and compilers available in .NET Framework, Perl, etc.


title: Lolcat

text: In the Java edition of the video game Minecraft, there is an option to change language settings to LOLCAT.


title: French phonology

text: French phonology is the sound system of French. This article discusses mainly the phonology of all the varieties of Standard French. Notable phonological features include its uvular r, nasal vowels, and three processes affecting word-final sounds:


title: French phonology

text: Although double consonant letters appear in the orthographic form of many French words, geminate consonants are relatively rare in the pronunciation of such words. The following cases can be identified.


title: French phonology

text: The geminate pronunciation is found in the future and conditional forms of the verbs ('to run') and ('to die'). The conditional form "il mourrait" ('he would die'), for example, contrasts with the imperfect form "il mourait" ('he was dying'). In some other words, most modern speakers have reduced to , such as "il pourrait" ('he could'). Other verbs that have a double orthographically in the future and conditional are pronounced with a simple : "il pourra" ('he will be able to'), "il verra" ('he will see').


title: French phonology

text: When the prefix combines with a base that begins with "n", the resulting word is sometimes pronounced with a geminate and similarly for the variants of the same prefix "im-", "il-", "ir-":


title: French phonology

text: Other cases of optional gemination can be found in words like ('syllable'), ('grammar'), and ('illusion'). The pronunciation of such words, in many cases, a spelling pronunciation varies by speaker and gives rise to widely varying stylistic effects. In particular, the gemination of consonants other than the liquids and nasals is "generally considered affected or pedantic". Examples of stylistically marked pronunciations include ('addition') and ('intelligence').


title: French phonology

text: A few cases of gemination do not correspond to double consonant letters in the orthography. The deletion of word-internal schwas (see below), for example, can give rise to sequences of identical consonants: "là-dedans" ('inside'), "l'honnêteté" ('honesty'). The elided form of the object pronoun "l<nowiki>'</nowiki>" ('him/her/it') is also realised as a geminate when it appears after another "l" to avoid misunderstanding:


title: French phonology

text: Finally, a word pronounced with emphatic stress can exhibit gemination of its first syllable-initial consonant:


title: French phonology

text: Many words in French can be analyzed as having a "latent" final consonant that is pronounced only in certain syntactic contexts when the next word begins with a vowel. For example, the word ('two') is pronounced in isolation or before a consonant-initial word ("deux jours" → 'two days'), but in "deux ans" (→ 'two years'), the linking or liaison consonant is pronounced.


title: French phonology

text: Standard French contrasts up to 13 oral vowels and up to 4 nasal vowels. The schwa (in the center of the diagram next to this paragraph) is not necessarily a distinctive sound. Even though it often merges with one of the mid front rounded vowels, its patterning suggests that it is a separate phoneme (see the subsection Schwa below).


title: French phonology

text: The table below primarily lists vowels in contemporary Parisian French, with vowels only present in other dialects in parentheses.


title: French phonology

text: While some dialects feature a long distinct from and a distinction between an open front and an open back , Parisian French features only and just one open vowel realised as central . Some dialects also feature a rounded , which has merged with in Paris.


title: French phonology

text: In French French, while is phonologically distinct, its phonetic quality tends to coincide with either or .


title: French phonology

text: In contrast with the mid vowels, there is no tense–lax contrast in close vowels. However, non-phonemic lax (near-close) appear in Quebec as allophones of when the vowel is both phonetically short (so not before ) and in a closed syllable, so that e.g. "petite" 'small ()' differs from "petit" 'small ()' not only in the presence of the final but also in the tenseness of the . Laxing always occurs in stressed closed syllables, but it is also found in other environments to various degrees.


title: French phonology

text: In French French, are consistently close , but the exact height of is somewhat debatable as it has been variously described as close and near-close .


title: French phonology

text: Although the mid vowels contrast in certain environments, there is a limited distributional overlap so they often appear in complementary distribution. Generally, close-mid vowels () are found in open syllables, and open-mid vowels () are found in closed syllables. However, there are minimal pairs:


title: French phonology

text: Beyond the general rule, known as the "loi de position" among French phonologists, there are some exceptions. For instance, and are found in closed syllables ending in , and only is found in closed monosyllables before , , and .


title: French phonology

text: The Parisian realization of has been variously described as central and centralized to before , in both cases becoming similar to .


title: French phonology

text: The phonemic opposition of and has been lost in the southern half of France, where these two sounds are found only in complementary distribution. The phonemic oppositions of and and of and in terminal open syllables have been lost in almost all of France, but not in Belgium or in areas with an Arpitan substrate, where and are still opposed as and .


title: French phonology

text: The phonemic contrast between front and back is sometimes not maintained in Standard French, which leads some researchers to reject the idea of two distinct phonemes. However, the distinction is still clearly maintained in other dialects such as Quebec French.


title: French phonology

text: While there is much variation among speakers in France, a number of general tendencies can be observed. First of all, the distinction is most often preserved in word-final stressed syllables such as in these minimal pairs:


title: French phonology

text: There are certain environments that prefer one open vowel over the other. For example, is preferred after and before :


title: French phonology

text: The difference in quality is often reinforced by a difference in length (but the difference is contrastive in final closed syllables). The exact distribution of the two vowels varies greatly from speaker to speaker.


title: French phonology

text: Even in the final syllable of a word, back may become if the word in question loses its stress within the extended phonological context:


title: French phonology

text: The phonetic qualities of the back nasal vowels differ from those of the corresponding oral vowels. The contrasting factor that distinguishes and is the extra lip rounding of the latter according to some linguists, and tongue height according to others. Speakers who produce both and distinguish them mainly through increased lip rounding of the former, but many speakers use only the latter phoneme, especially most speakers in northern France such as Paris (but not farther north, in Belgium).


title: French phonology

text: In some dialects, particularly that of Europe, there is an attested tendency for nasal vowels to shift in a counterclockwise direction: tends to be more open and shifts toward the vowel space of (realised also as ), rises and rounds to (realised also as ) and shifts to or . Also, there also is an opposite movement for for which it becomes more open and unrounds to , resulting in a merger of Standard French and in this case. According to one source, the typical phonetic realization of the nasal vowels in Paris is for , for and for , suggesting that the first two are unrounded open vowels that contrast by backness (like the oral and in some accents), whereas is much closer than .


title: French phonology

text: In Quebec French, two of the vowels shift in a different direction: → , more or less as in Europe, but → and → .


title: French phonology

text: In the Provence and Occitanie regions, nasal vowels are often realized as oral vowels before a stop consonant, thus reviving the otherwise lost in other accents: quarante → .


title: French phonology

text: When phonetically realised, schwa (), also called "e " ('dropped e') and "e " ('mute e'), is a mid-central vowel with some rounding. Many authors consider it to be phonetically identical to . Geoff Lindsey suggests the symbol . state, more specifically, that it merges with before high vowels and glides:


title: French phonology

text: and that it merges with elsewhere. However, some speakers make a clear distinction, and it exhibits special phonological behavior that warrants considering it a distinct phoneme. Furthermore, the merger occurs mainly in the French of France; in Quebec, and are still distinguished.


title: French phonology

text: The main characteristic of French schwa is its "instability": the fact that under certain conditions it has no phonetic realization.


title: French phonology

text: In French versification, word-final schwa is always elided before another vowel and at the ends of verses. It is pronounced before a following consonant-initial word. For example, "une grande femme fut ici, " in ordinary speech, would in verse be pronounced , with the enunciated at the end of each word.


title: French phonology

text: Schwa cannot normally be realised as a front vowel () in closed syllables. In such contexts in inflectional and derivational morphology, schwa usually alternates with the front vowel :


title: French phonology

text: Instances of orthographic that do not exhibit the behaviour described above may be better analysed as corresponding to the stable, full vowel . The enclitic pronoun , for example, always keeps its vowel in contexts like "donnez-le-moi" → ('give it to me') for which schwa deletion would normally apply (giving *), and it counts as a full syllable for the determination of stress.


title: French phonology

text: Cases of word-internal stable are more subject to variation among speakers, but, for example, "un rebelle" ('a rebel') must be pronounced with a full vowel in contrast to "un rebond" → or ('a bounce').


title: French phonology

text: Except for the distinction still made by some speakers between and in rare minimal pairs like ('to put') vs. ('teacher'), variation in vowel length is entirely allophonic. Vowels can be lengthened in closed, stressed syllables, under the following two conditions:


title: French phonology

text: When such syllables lose their stress, the lengthening effect may be absent. The vowel of is long in "Regarde comme elle saute !", in which the word is phrase-final and therefore stressed, but not in "Qu'est-ce qu'elle saute bien !" In accents wherein is distinguished from , however, it is still pronounced with a long vowel even in an unstressed position, as in "fête" in "C'est une fête importante."


title: French phonology

text: The following table presents the pronunciation of a representative sample of words in phrase-final (stressed) position:


title: French phonology

text: In Parisian French, the close vowels and the mid front at the end of utterances can be devoiced. A devoiced vowel may be followed by a sound similar to the voiceless palatal fricative :


title: French phonology

text: In Quebec French, close vowels are often devoiced when unstressed and surrounded by voiceless consonants:


title: French phonology

text: Though a more prominent feature of Quebec French, phrase-medial devoicing is also found in European French.


title: French phonology

text: The final vowel (usually ) of a number of monosyllabic function words is elided in syntactic combinations with a following word that begins with a vowel. For example, compare the pronunciation of the unstressed subject pronoun, in "je dors" ('I am sleeping'), and in "j'arrive" ('I am arriving').


title: French phonology

text: The glides , , and appear in syllable onsets immediately followed by a full vowel. In many cases, they alternate systematically with their vowel counterparts , , and such as in the following pairs of verb forms:


title: French phonology

text: The glides in the examples can be analyzed as the result of a glide formation process that turns an underlying high vowel into a glide when followed by another vowel: → .


title: French phonology

text: This process is usually blocked after a complex onset of the form obstruent + liquid (a stop or a fricative followed by or ). For example, while the pair "loue"/"louer" shows an alternation between and , the same suffix added to "cloue" , a word with a complex onset, does not trigger the glide formation: "clouer" ('to nail'). Some sequences of glide + vowel can be found after obstruent-liquid onsets, however. The main examples are , as in "pluie" ('rain'), , as in "trois" ('three'), and , as in "groin" ('snout'). They can be dealt with in different ways, as by adding appropriate contextual conditions to the glide formation rule or by assuming that the phonemic inventory of French includes underlying glides or rising diphthongs like and .


title: French phonology

text: Glide formation normally does not occur across morpheme boundaries in compounds like "semi-aride" ('semi-arid'). However, in colloquial registers, "si elle" ('if she') can be pronounced just like ('sky'), or "tu as" ('you have') like "tua" ('[(s)he] killed').


title: French phonology

text: The glide can also occur in syllable coda position, after a vowel, as in ('sun'). There again, one can formulate a derivation from an underlying full vowel , but the analysis is not always adequate because of the existence of possible minimal pairs like ('country') / ('paycheck') and ('abbey') / ('bee'). Schane (1968) proposes an abstract analysis deriving postvocalic from an underlying lateral by palatalization and glide conversion ( → → ).


title: French phonology

text: Word stress is not distinctive in French, so two words cannot be distinguished based on stress placement alone. Grammatical stress is always on the final full syllable (syllable with a vowel other than schwa) of a word. Monosyllables with schwa as their only vowel (, , , etc.) are generally clitics but otherwise may receive stress.


title: French phonology

text: The difference between stressed and unstressed syllables in French is less marked than in English. Vowels in unstressed syllables keep their full quality, regardless of whether the rhythm of the speaker is syllable-timed or mora-timed (see isochrony). Moreover, words lose their stress to varying degrees when pronounced in phrases and sentences. In general, only the last word in a phonological phrase retains its full grammatical stress (on its last full syllable).


title: French phonology

text: Emphatic stress is used to call attention to a specific element in a given context such as to express a contrast or to reinforce the emotive content of a word. In French, this stress falls on the first consonant-initial syllable of the word in question. The characteristics associated with emphatic stress include increased amplitude and pitch of the vowel and gemination of the onset consonant, as mentioned above. Emphatic stress does not replace, but occurs in tandem with, grammatical stress.


title: French phonology

text: For words that begin with a vowel, emphatic stress falls on the first syllable that begins with a consonant or on the initial syllable with the insertion of a glottal stop or a liaison consonant.


title: Formal science

text: Formal science is a branch of science studying disciplines concerned with abstract structures described by formal systems, such as logic, mathematics, statistics, theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, information theory, game theory, systems theory, decision theory, and theoretical linguistics. Whereas the natural sciences and social sciences seek to characterize physical systems and social systems, respectively, using empirical methods, the formal sciences use language tools concerned with characterizing abstract structures described by formal systems. The formal sciences aid the natural and social sciences by providing information about the structures used to describe the physical world, and what inferences may be made about them.


title: Formal science

text: The modern usage of the term "formal sciences", in English-language literature, occurs at least as early as 1860, in a posthumous publication of lectures on philosophy by Sir William Hamilton wherein logic and mathematics are listed as formal sciences. Going even further back to 1819, a German-language textbook on logic was published by Wilhelm Esser, elucidating the significance of the designation "formal science" ("Formalwissenschaft") as applied to logic; an English-language translation of it is provided in William Hamilton's lecture:


title: Formal science

text: Formal sciences began before the formulation of the scientific method, with the most ancient mathematical texts dating back to 1800 BC (Babylonian mathematics), 1600 BC (Egyptian mathematics) and 1000 BC (Indian mathematics). From then on, different cultures such as the Greek, Arab and Persian made major contributions to mathematics, while the Chinese and Japanese, independently of more distant cultures, developed their own mathematical tradition.


title: Formal science

text: Besides mathematics, logic is another example of one of oldest subjects in the field of the formal sciences. As an explicit analysis of the methods of reasoning, logic received sustained development originally in three places: India from the , China in the , and Greece between the and the . The formally sophisticated treatment of modern logic descends from the Greek tradition, being informed from the transmission of Aristotelian logic, which was then further developed by Islamic logicians. The Indian tradition also continued into the early modern period. The native Chinese tradition did not survive beyond antiquity, though Indian logic was later adopted in medieval China.


title: Formal science

text: As a number of other disciplines of formal science rely heavily on mathematics, they did not exist until mathematics had developed to a relatively advanced level. Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal (1654), and Christiaan Huygens (1657) started the earliest study of probability theory. In the early 1800s, Gauss and Laplace developed the mathematical theory of statistics, which also explained the use of statistics in insurance and governmental accounting. Mathematical statistics was recognized as a mathematical discipline in the early 20th century.


title: Formal science

text: In the mid-20th century, mathematics was broadened and enriched by the rise of new mathematical sciences and engineering disciplines such as operations research and systems engineering. These sciences benefited from basic research in electrical engineering and then by the development of electrical computing, which also stimulated information theory, numerical analysis (scientific computing), and theoretical computer science. Theoretical computer science also benefits from the discipline of mathematical logic, which includes the theory of computation.


title: Formal science

text: Branches of formal science include logic, mathematics, statistics, data science, information science, systems science and computer science.


title: Formal science

text: As opposed to empirical sciences (natural and social), the formal sciences do not involve empirical procedures. They also do not presuppose knowledge of contingent facts, or describe the real world. In this sense, formal sciences are both logically and methodologically "a priori", for their content and validity are independent of any empirical procedures.


title: Formal science

text: Therefore, strictly speaking, formal science is not an empirical science. It is a formal logical system with its content targeted at components of experiential reality, such as information and thoughts. As Francis Bacon pointed out in the 17th century, experimental verification of the propositions must be carried out rigorously and cannot take logic itself as the way to draw conclusions in nature. Formal science is a method that is helpful to empirical science but cannot replace empirical science.


title: Formal science

text: Although formal sciences are conceptual systems, lacking empirical content, this does not mean that they have no relation to the real world. But this relation is such that their formal statements hold in all possible conceivable worlds – whereas, statements based on empirical theories, such as, say, general relativity or evolutionary biology, do not hold in all possible worlds, and may eventually turn out not to hold in this world as well. That is why formal sciences are applicable in all domains and useful in all empirical sciences.


title: Formal science

text: Because of their non-empirical nature, formal sciences are construed by outlining a set of axioms and definitions from which other statements (theorems) are deduced. For this reason, in Rudolf Carnap's logical-positivist conception of the epistemology of science, theories belonging to formal sciences are understood to contain no synthetic statements, instead containing only analytic statements.


title: Super Mario RPG

text: Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is a role-playing video game developed by Square and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1996. It was the final "Mario" game published for the SNES. The game was directed by Chihiro Fujioka and Yoshihiko Maekawa, produced by "Mario" creator Shigeru Miyamoto, and scored by Yoko Shimomura.


title: Super Mario RPG

text: "Super Mario RPG" story focuses on Mario and his friends as they seek to defeat Smithy, who has crashed into their world and stolen the seven star pieces of Star Road. "Super Mario RPG" is the first RPG in the "Mario" franchise, drawing from major elements of Square's RPG franchises such as "Final Fantasy". The main form of fighting enemies is turn-based combat with a party of up to three characters. It is also the first game in the Mario franchise to have gameplay within an isometric 3D environment, allowing for a new variety of the exploration and platforming elements reminiscent of the "Super Mario" series.


title: Super Mario RPG

text: "Super Mario RPG" was critically acclaimed, and particularly praised for its humor and 3D-rendered graphics. It was the inspiration for Nintendo's other role-playing series, "Paper Mario" and "Mario & Luigi", and both are spiritual successors which retain some gameplay elements. "Super Mario RPG" was released on the Wii Virtual Console service in 2008, marking its debut in Europe and Australia, and later for the Wii U's Virtual Console in 2015. It was also included with the Super NES Classic Edition in 2017.


title: Super Mario RPG

text: "Super Mario RPG" contains token similarities to other Square-developed video games, such as the "Final Fantasy" series, along with a story and gameplay based on the "Super Mario Bros." series of platform games. Like most traditional JRPGs, the two main sections of the game are adventuring and turn-based battle sequences. Much of "Super Mario RPG"s gameplay is outside monster battles and plays like an isometric 3D platformer, in which traditional "Mario" elements such as punching floating question blocks from below are prominent. There are no random encounters and as such enemies are visible in the field; a battle ensues only if Mario comes in contact with one. This allows the player to evade unnecessary battles.


title: Super Mario RPG

text: The player's party initially begins with only Mario and grows to five characters. Mario and up to two other members participate in battles, who can be swapped in and out while the player explores the overworld. Each of the five characters has a unique set of attacks and techniques. For example, Princess Toadstool's abilities are primarily healing techniques, whereas Geno and Bowser have offensive attacks that deal high amounts of damage. The combat is based on a traditional turn-based battle system with the addition of action commands that amplify a move's effects. The player starts each turn by choosing to attack, defend, run, use an item, or perform magic from the combat menu. The action command consists of timed button presses during an attack, special move, defense, or item usage, which became a mainstay of later "Mario" RPGs.


title: Super Mario RPG

text: The game world is set in a geographically diverse land, which includes mountains, forests, and bodies of water. Each region has distinct characteristics held by its inhabitants; Mushroom Kingdom is inhabited by Toads, Moleville is inhabited by moles, Monstro Town is populated by reformed monsters, Yo'ster Isle is where Yoshi and his eponymous species reside, and Nimbus Land is an area inhabited by cloud people. Bowser's Castle is another prominent location in the game, as it holds the portal to the main antagonist's homeworld.


title: Super Mario RPG

text: As in most "Super Mario" games, the main protagonist is Mario, whose initial goal is to rescue Princess Toadstool from Bowser. Soon after the start of his journey, the Smithy Gang invades the world. While attempting to stop the group, Mario is joined by Mallow, a cloud boy who thinks he is a tadpole; Geno, a doll possessed by a celestial spirit from the Star Road; Bowser, whose armies have deserted him out of fear of the Smithy Gang; and Princess Toadstool, who was lost in the turmoil that occurred when the Smithy Gang arrived. The Smithy Gang is led by Smithy, a robotic blacksmith from an alternate dimension with aspirations of world domination.