title: Television Centre, London

text: Opened on 29 June 1960, it was designed as a drama studio and had customised panels and fittings. The walls were slightly thicker to insulate it from noise from the Circle line and Hammersmith & City line (then still part of the Metropolitan line) of the London Underground. It was the first studio to be completed and was upgraded to colour in 1969. Studio 3 currently broadcasts ITV programmes "Good Morning Britain" and "This Morning". It was one of two studios that hosted the Eurovision Song Contest 1963 the other being Studio 4.


title: Television Centre, London

text: Opened in 1989 as a music studio, with what would later become Studio 12 as its control room; Productions included for UK Play and during its later life was equipped for producing virtual reality programmes. It was home to "Liquid News" between 2000 and 2002 and CBeebies in vision continuity between 2002 and 2008. After that it was used by BBC Research.


title: Television Centre, London

text: Opened in January 1961, TC4 was similar in design and layout to its neighbour, TC3. It was designed as a light entertainment studio and contained a rather unusual sound system called ambiophony. It was upgraded to colour in 1970 and to HD and surround sound in 2008.


title: Television Centre, London

text: Opened in August 1961, it was used for the first half of its life by broadcasts from BBC Schools. There was an adjacent area used for schools programming that linked in with the studio. It was converted to colour around 1973, about the same time as schools broadcasts as a whole. It was closed briefly during the mid-1980s, and reopened in 1987 following a two-year refurbishment. It was the home of BBC Sport's programmes until November 2011 when the Sports department moved to MediaCityUK.


title: Television Centre, London

text: TC5 hosted an experimental session in 1963 to create video ‘howlaround’ footage for ‘Doctor Who’, although only a small amount was used in the original title sequence as transmitted.


title: Television Centre, London

text: Opened in July 1967 to coincide with BBC Two's switch to colour. It was the first to be equipped with colour cameras. It was a strange design: it was originally designed to be split in two by a large removable wall, but this idea was abandoned. The gallery was moved in 1993 and the old gallery became home to the BBC Red Button control room. Upgraded to HD in July 2010, the first 3D capable studio in the UK. Home to children's programmes "Live & Kicking" and "Dick & Dom in da Bungalow", and "Pointless".


title: Television Centre, London

text: Opened in 1962 and was used for a variety of programmes. Home to children's programming such as "Going Live!", before being home to BBC News in 1997. It was the home of the "BBC Breakfast" programme until 2012 and the "BBC News at Six" bulletin until 2013, with other bulletins based at N6 in the News Centre. It was vacated on 15 March 2013, following the refit of the extension to Broadcasting House, to where the BBC News department and newsroom moved.


title: Television Centre, London

text: Opened in 1967, considered the best studio for television producers to use. It was the size that most programmes wanted and, building on the experience when building the other studios, was the best. It became the studio for comedy and sitcoms, because of its audience seating arrangements and size. It was converted to HD in January 2007.


title: Television Centre, London

text: Built in 1955 as a foyer area of the restaurant block, becoming a store area, converted to a studio in 1996 for Children's BBC. The location was highly convenient: it allowed the invision continuity to be relocated from the "Broom Cupboard" (continuity announcer's booth) to a roomier studio. It opened onto the Blue Peter Garden allowing presentation to take place there. It was an odd shape, and was used for invision continuity for CBBC until 2004, when they broadcast links for the CBBC Channel only. All invision continuity was dropped in 2006, and it was used for programmes such as "Sam & Mark's TMi Friday" and "SMart".


title: Television Centre, London

text: Opened as N1 in September 1969, it was used for the BBC1 daytime news bulletins, and the home of BBC World (previously BBC World Service News) from 1993. Closed in spring 1999 when news bulletins moved to the News Centre section of Television Centre, and renamed as TC10. Used for some programmes by channel UK Play until the station's closure. Between 2004 and 2006 it was used for in-vision continuity for CBBC on BBC One and BBC Two, before being used by some programming for CBBC such as "Level Up". From 2010 to 2011 it was the home of CBeebies.


title: Television Centre, London

text: Opened as N2 in September 1969, and the same size as N1, it was used for the BBC2 daytime news bulletins. Extended in 1985 to include props store and adjacent lobby, it became home to the "Six O'Clock" and "Nine O'Clock News". In spring 1999, following the completion of the News Centre spur of Television Centre, the news moved out and it was renamed TC11. In 2002 it became home to "Liquid News" and later to the other BBC Three news programmes "60 Seconds" and "The 7 O'Clock News". It briefly played host to the domestic BBC News bulletins while their studios were refurbished in 2006, before becoming general purpose. It was home to "" until 15 December 2011, after which the studio was closed.


title: Television Centre, London

text: Originally built as a control room for the music studio originally located in Studio 0. Studio 12 was converted into an ad-hoc studio in 2004 for CBBC programmes, most notably for the interactive "live cartoon" series "Nelly Nut Live!" which aired from 2003 to 2005. It was also used for "Sportsround" for some years, but was eventually converted into a presentation studio in 2006. It was used for in-vision continuity for CBBC and changed into an in-vision continuity studio in summer 2007. The set was transferred to a mini studio in the East Tower. It was used by BBC Research.


title: Television Centre, London

text: Opened in 1960, designed for in-vision continuity for BBC 1, but was used as such for only three years. Became weather studio prior to the move to the BBC Weather Centre in 1990 (also in Television Centre), following which it was used by Children's BBC to supplement presentation from the 'Broom Cupboard', and was used for slots such as birthdays and public holidays. It became full-time home of Children's BBC in 1994 following the vacation of the 'Broom Cupboard'. It closed following CBBC's move to TC9 and was converted into additional presentation control rooms. The substantially thick wall between Pres A and B was removed and a mezzanine floor constructed to house a larger presentation control area for interactive and children's channels CBBC and CBeebies.


title: Television Centre, London

text: Opened in 1964, Pres B was designed for in-vision continuity for BBC 2, but that channel did not use in-vision continuity for more than a few months after launch. Became a general purpose studio housing small productions such as "Points of View", the "Film" series with Barry Norman and "The Old Grey Whistle Test". It closed in 1996 and initially remained disused until it was converted (along with Pres A) into additional presentation control rooms. The substantially thick wall between Pres A and B was removed and a mezzanine floor constructed to house a larger presentation control area for interactive and children's channels CBBC and CBeebies.


title: Television Centre, London

text: In addition to these studios, BBC News used a number of studios for the frequent news bulletins. These studios have a different naming system owing to their permanent usage and were not included on most studio lists, as they were unavailable for hire.


title: Television Centre, London

text: These studios were located in Stage 5 & Stage 6, commonly known as the BBC News Centre. BBC News moved out of Stage 6 in 2013 to the new BBC News Centre at New Broadcasting House in Central London. After redevelopment, Stage 6 became the new home to the commercial arm of the BBC, BBC Studios.


title: Television Centre, London

text: There was no N7, to avoid confusion with TC7, which housed 'big' news programmes such as "BBC Breakfast", "Working Lunch", and "Newsnight".


title: Television Centre, London

text: In February 1996, the electricity and heating were transferred to a European Gas Turbines (EGT) 4.9MWe Typhoon gas turbine combined heating, power and cooling unit. It included a 6MW Thermax air conditioning (cooling) vapour absorption machine (VAM). The £6m HVAC system reduced energy costs by 35%, and paid for itself within three years. A second turbine was added, without a second chimney. However, in 2008 the BBC admitted that the energy system was being used for emergency purposes only as it had become cost-ineffective to use full-time. Excess electricity produced at night has not been returned to the National Grid, as originally planned. In November 2003, the turbine's chimneys caught fire, bringing TV output to a halt. After the fire the turbines were no longer used regularly.


title: Television Centre, London

text: On 4 March 2001, a bomb placed outside the news centre exploded, with no fatalities. It was attributed to the Real IRA and the culprits were eventually caught. The front of the building suffered moderate damage, but was soon repaired.


title: Television Centre, London

text: Television Centre has suffered from power cuts that affected normal broadcasting, but these were not seen as a systemic problem. One such power cut caused the launch night of BBC2, on 20 April 1964, to be cancelled; programmes began the next day.


title: Television Centre, London

text: A major power failure occurred on 20 June 2000 at approximately 5 p.m., affecting the entire Television Centre resulting in services such as BBC Two and BBC Radio 4 coming off air, and BBC News 24 went off air before being relocated to the BBC's Westminster studios. The "Six O'Clock News" suffered severe lighting problems and had to be cancelled halfway through, and the BBC's backup generator caught fire. Troubles were experienced in the South East region, as "Newsroom South East" started later than planned. The fire alarms went off at Television Centre later that day, leaving only a skeleton crew. Eventually many programmes returned, from different locations: "Newsnight" was presented from the main news studio with intermittent technical problems. The issues were attributed to a failing substation in Shepherd's Bush. Normal services resumed the following day.


title: Television Centre, London

text: Just before 8 a.m. on 28 November 2003 an electrical fault caused some equipment to overheat, which set off fire alarms. Although there was no fire, the fault caused widespread power cuts and prevented backup generators from providing alternative power. All output was affected with services transferred across London to alternative studios. The One O'Clock News and BBC News 24 broadcast for much of the day from the BBC's Millbank Studios, and the "Today" programme and Five Live's "Breakfast" morning radio shows fell off air for 15 minutes. The Millbank Studios are a fall-back for news operations in the event of TVC failure, and are continually recording the last hour of the BBC News Channel output (without in-vision clock) for this purpose. This power cut came on the week prior to the relaunch of News 24, which was postponed for another week to ensure that all problems had been remedied.


title: Television Centre, London

text: Programmes have been interrupted by protesters gaining access to Television Centre. In 1988, a group of lesbian protestors campaigning against Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 gained access to the studio of the "Six O'Clock News" during a live broadcast. Newsreader Sue Lawley continued with the broadcast, while co-presenter Nicholas Witchell tackled the intruders off-camera.


title: Television Centre, London

text: On 20 May 2006 during the live broadcast of "National Lottery: Jet Set" the studio was invaded by members of the Fathers 4 Justice campaign group, causing the show to go briefly off air while the protesters were removed. This was also a problem as that night's lottery broadcast ran straight into the Eurovision Song Contest 2006.


title: Television Centre, London

text: For "Question Time" on 22 October 2009, the BBC invited the leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin, onto the programme for the first time causing heated public debate and strong protests outside the studios. Television Centre had its security breached with around 30 anti-fascist protesters storming the reception area and several hundred protesters gathering outside. Police and security staff were forced to close gates leading into the centre and form barriers to prevent any further breaches of security.


title: Television Centre, London

text: On 9 August 2021 a number of anti-vaccine protestors upset with BBC News for "promoting Covid-19 vaccines" attempted to gain access to Television Centre. The BBC's news operations were not on site as they had left the facility in 2013. Police were deployed to prevent the protestors entering BBC Studioworks, and some of the protesters later marched to Broadcasting House where BBC News is based.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: The American Solidarity Party (ASP) is a Christian-democratic political party in the United States. It was founded in 2011 and officially incorporated in 2016. The party has a Solidarity National Committee (SNC) and has numerous active state and local chapters. Brian Carroll was the party's nominee in the 2020 presidential election.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: The American Solidarity Party has been characterized as socially conservative while supporting government intervention in economic matters. The ASP encourages social development along the lines of subsidiarity and sphere sovereignty, with a stated emphasis on "the importance of strong families, local communities, and voluntary associations". It favors fiscally progressive policies and a social market economy with a distributist character, that seeks "widespread economic participation and ownership" and providing a social safety net program.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: The party's original name was inspired by its European counterparts, the Polish trade union Solidarity, and the current one reflects its more developed ideology and focus in the years since.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: The ASP mascot is the pelican, a traditional symbol of charity. The party's political color is orange, like other Christian-democratic political parties.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: On social media, ASP members use the orange heart emoji to denote their "whole-life ethic" and Christian democratic influences, similar to the rose emoji's use as a symbol for the Democratic Socialists of America.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: The ASP was founded in 2011 as the Christian Democratic Party USA (CDPUSA). In 2012, the CDPUSA endorsed the independent candidacy of Joe Schriner for president. In December 2020, the American Solidarity Party joined the board of the Coalition for Free and Open Elections (COFOE).


title: American Solidarity Party

text: The American Solidarity Party largely adheres to the ideology of Christian democracy, which has been influenced by Catholic social teaching, Neo-Calvinist theology and the social teachings espoused by other traditions of Christianity in various parts of the world. As such, the ASP looks to the Christian democratic movements in Europe and the Americas.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: The American Solidarity Party has been characterized as conservative on social issues while supporting government intervention in economic matters, making it communitarian.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: The American Solidarity Party opposes abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment on the basis of the sanctity of human life. It views family as being central to society.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: The American Solidarity Party supports a universal healthcare system as well as an economy containing widespread distribution of productive property, in particular increased worker ownership and management of their production.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: The American Solidarity Party is noninterventionist in its foreign policy, using peace as its guiding principle. It supports foreign aid and nonviolent diplomacy, while opposing violent military action as a means to resolve conflicts.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: Daniel Silliman writes that the American Solidarity Party, as with other Christian-democratic political parties, draws from Catholic social teaching and Neo-Calvinist theology. In the same vein, David McPherson says that the American Solidarity Party "affirm[s] ... the full spectrum of Catholic social teaching (namely, the teachings regarding the sanctity of human life, the common good, subsidiarity, religious freedom, solidarity, etc.)," contrasting the ASP to both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, each of which recognizes only some of these items. Its strongest support is in California, Ohio, and Texas, according to the "Madera Tribune" (of Madera, California).


title: American Solidarity Party

text: During the 2016 presidential election season, the American Solidarity Party held an online convention on July 9, 2016, which nominated Amir Azarvan of Georgia for president and Mike Maturen of Michigan for vice-president. However, Azarvan subsequently withdrew, and in response the ticket was revised, with Maturen running for president and Juan Muñoz of Texas running for vice-president.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: For the 2016 election, the American Solidarity Party was listed on the ballot in Colorado. It was a certified write-in option in Alabama, California, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, and Washington. Maturen received 6,697 reported votes, not including states that did not report votes for him.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: For the November 2017 off-year elections, the American Solidarity Party ran a candidate for New Jersey legislature, Monica Sohler, in the 6th district. She received 821 votes.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: Desmond Silveira, a software engineer, was a national committee member of the American Solidarity Party, served as the campaign manager for the Maturen-Muñoz 2016 campaign, the vice chair of the ASP, and the director of operations for the party. In 2018, he ran for governor, receiving 4,633 votes in the primary election.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: Brian T. Carroll ran against Devin Nunes for California's 22nd congressional district receiving 1,591 votes in the primary election.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: Shane Ian Hoffman ran as the ASP's candidate in Ohio's 15th Congressional District. He did not make the ballot and was a write-in candidate.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: In the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Brian Carroll, Joe Schriner, and Joshua Perkins announced their candidacies for the ASP nomination. Carroll was declared the winner of the nomination on September 9, 2019.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: For the 2020 election, the American Solidarity Party was on the ballot in Arkansas, Colorado, Guam, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: Benjamin Schmitz ran for state senate in the Wisconsin 13th state senate district in the April 6th legislative special election. Stephen Hollenberg ran for a state house seat in the Merrimack, New Hampshire special election on April 13, 2021.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: Dr. James G Hanink was endorsed by the American Solidarity Party for the 2021 California gubernatorial recall election. He hosts the Open Door podcast and is the president of the American Maritain Association. Dr. Hanink is a frequent contributor to the New Oxford Review and spent four decades dedicated to teaching at Loyola Marymount University and published papers in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and social thought. Hanink received 7,193 votes, 0.01% of all votes, an increase in both raw votes and percentage from Silveira's 2018 gubernatorial run.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: Erskine L. Levi ran for U.S. Congress as a write-in candidate in California's 31st congressional district.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: The party endorsed Democratic candidate and And Campaign co-founder Pastor Chris Butler for U.S. Congress in Illinois's 1st congressional district.


title: American Solidarity Party

text: The Utah state party endorsed Independent Senate candidate Evan McMullin in the 2022 Utah Senate Election.


title: MiniDisc

text: MiniDisc (MD) is an erasable magneto-optical disc-based data storage format offering a capacity of 60, 74, and later, 80 minutes of digitized audio.


title: MiniDisc

text: Sony announced the MiniDisc in September 1992 and released it in November of that year for sale in Japan and in December in Europe, North America, and other countries. The music format was based on ATRAC audio data compression, Sony's own proprietary compression code. Its successor, Hi-MD, would later introduce the option of linear PCM digital recording to meet audio quality comparable to that of a compact disc. MiniDiscs were very popular in Japan and found moderate success in Europe; although it was designed to be the successor of the cassette tape, it did not manage to mass replace it globally.


title: MiniDisc

text: By March 2011 Sony had sold 22 million MD players. Sony has ceased development of MD devices, with the last of the players sold by March 2013.


title: MiniDisc

text: In 1983, just a year after the introduction of the Compact Disc, Kees Schouhamer Immink and Joseph Braat presented the first experiments with erasable magneto-optical Compact Discs during the 73rd AES Convention in Eindhoven. It took almost 10 years, however, before their idea was commercialized.


title: MiniDisc

text: Sony's MiniDisc was one of two rival digital systems, both introduced in 1992, that were targeted as replacements for the Philips Compact Cassette analog audio tape system: the other was the Digital Compact Cassette (DCC), created by Philips and Matsushita (now Panasonic). Sony had originally intended the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) to be the dominant home digital audio recording format, replacing the analog cassette. Because of technical delays, the DAT was not launched until 1989, and by then the U.S. dollar had fallen so far against the yen that the introductory DAT machine Sony had intended to market for about $400 in the late 1980s now had to retail for $800 or even $1,000 to break even, putting it out of reach of most users.


title: MiniDisc

text: Relegating DAT to professional use, Sony set to work to come up with a simpler, more economical digital home format. By the time Sony came up with the MiniDisc in late 1992, Philips had introduced a competing system, DCC, on a magnetic tape cassette. This created marketing confusion very similar to the videocassette format war of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Sony licensed MD technology to other manufacturers, with JVC, Sharp, Pioneer, Panasonic and others producing their own MD products. However, non-Sony machines were not widely available in North America, and companies such as Technics and Radio Shack tended to promote DCC instead.


title: MiniDisc

text: Despite having a loyal customer base largely of musicians and audio enthusiasts, the MiniDisc met with only limited success in the United States. It was very popular in Japan and parts of Asia, and relatively so in Europe during the 1990s and into the 00's, but did not enjoy comparable sales success in other markets. Since then, recordable CDs, flash memory and HDD and solid-state-based digital audio players such as iPods have become increasingly popular as playback devices.


title: MiniDisc

text: The initial low uptake of MiniDisc was attributed to the small number of pre-recorded albums available on MD as relatively few record labels embraced the format. The initial high cost of equipment and blank media was also a factor. Additionally, home MiniDisc decks were less widely available, with most consumers instead connecting a portable MD device to the hi-fi system in order to record.


title: MiniDisc

text: MiniDisc technology was faced with new competition from the recordable compact disc (CD-R) when it became more affordable to consumers beginning around 1996. Initially, Sony believed that it would take around a decade for CD-R prices to become affordable – the cost of a typical blank CD-R disc was around $12 in 1994 – but CD-R prices fell much more rapidly than envisioned, to the point where CD-R blanks sank below $1 per disc by the late 1990s, compared to at least $2 for the cheapest 80-minute MiniDisc blanks.


title: MiniDisc

text: The biggest competition for MiniDisc came from the emergence of MP3 players. With the Diamond Rio player in 1998 and the Apple iPod in 2001, the mass market began to eschew physical media in favor of more convenient file-based systems.


title: MiniDisc

text: By 2007, because of the waning popularity of the format and the increasing popularity of solid-state MP3 players, Sony was producing only one model, the Hi-MD MZ-RH1, also available as the MZ-M200 in North America packaged with a Sony microphone and limited Apple Macintosh software support.


title: MiniDisc

text: The introduction of the MZ-RH1 allowed users to freely move uncompressed digital recordings back and forth from the MiniDisc to a computer without the copyright protection limitations previously imposed upon the NetMD series. This allowed the MiniDisc to better compete with HD recorders and MP3 players. However, most pro users like broadcasters and news reporters had already abandoned MiniDisc in favor of solid-state recorders, because of their long recording times, open digital content sharing, high-quality digital recording capabilities and reliable, lightweight design.


title: MiniDisc

text: On 7 July 2011, Sony announced that it would no longer ship MiniDisc Walkman products as of September 2011, effectively killing the format.


title: MiniDisc

text: On 1 February 2013, Sony issued a press release on the Nikkei stock exchange that it would cease shipment of all MD devices, with last of the players to be sold in March 2013. However, it would continue to sell blank discs and offer repair services. Other manufacturers continued to release their own MiniDisc players long after Sony stopped, with TEAC & TASCAM producing new decks up until 2020 when both its consumer and professional products, TEAC MD-70CD and TASCAM MD-CD1MKIII, were discontinued.


title: MiniDisc

text: The disc is permanently housed in a cartridge (68×72×5 mm) with a sliding door, similar to the casing of a 3.5" floppy disk. This shutter is opened automatically by a mechanism upon insertion into a drive. MiniDiscs can either be recordable (blank) or premastered. Recordable MiniDiscs use a magneto-optical system to write data: a laser below the disc heats a spot to its Curie point, making the material in the disc susceptible to a magnetic field. A magnetic head above the disc then alters the polarity of the heated area, recording the digital data onto the disk. Playback is accomplished with the laser alone: taking advantage of the magneto-optic Kerr effect, the player senses the polarization of the reflected light and thus interprets a 1 or a 0. Recordable MDs can be rerecorded repeatedly, with Sony claiming up to one million times. By May 2005, there were 60-minute, 74-minute and 80-minute discs available. 60-minute blanks, which were widely available in the early years of the format's introduction, were phased out and are now rarely seen.


title: MiniDisc

text: MiniDiscs use a mastering process and optical playback system that is very similar to CDs. The recorded signal of the premastered pits and of the recordable MD are also very similar. Eight-to-Fourteen Modulation (EFM) and a modification of CD's CIRC code, called Advanced Cross Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code (ACIRC) are employed.


title: MiniDisc

text: MiniDiscs use rewritable magneto-optical storage to store the data. Unlike DCC or the analog Compact Cassette, MiniDisc is a random-access medium, making seek time very fast. MiniDiscs can be edited very quickly even on portable machines. Tracks can be split, combined, moved or deleted with ease either on the player or uploaded to a PC with Sony's SonicStage V4.3 software and edited there. Transferring data from an MD unit to a non-Windows machine can only be done in real time, preferably via optical I/O, by connecting the audio out port of the MD to an available audio in port of the computer. With the release of the Hi-MD format, Sony began to release Macintosh compatible software. However, the Mac compatible software was still not compatible with legacy MD formats (SP, LP2, LP4). This means that using an MD recorded on a legacy unit or in a legacy format still requires a Windows machine for non-real time transfers.


title: MiniDisc

text: At the beginning of the disc there is a table of contents (TOC, also known as the System File area of the disc), which stores the start positions of the various tracks, as well as metadata (title, artist) about them and free blocks. Unlike the conventional cassette, a recorded song does not need to be stored as one piece on the disc, it can be stored in several fragments, similar to a hard drive. Early MiniDisc equipment had a fragment granularity of 4 seconds of audio. Fragments smaller than the granularity are not kept track of, which may lead to the usable capacity of a disc actually shrinking. No means of defragmenting the disc is provided in consumer grade equipment.


title: MiniDisc

text: All consumer-grade MiniDisc devices feature a copy-protection scheme known as Serial Copy Management System. An unprotected disc or song can be copied without limit, but the copies can no longer be digitally copied. However, as a concession to this the most recent Hi-MD players can upload to PC a digitally recorded file which can subsequently be resaved as a WAV (PCM) file and thus replicated.


title: MiniDisc

text: The digitally encoded audio signal on a MiniDisc has traditionally been data-compressed using the ATRAC format (Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding).


title: MiniDisc

text: ATRAC was devised to allow MiniDisc to support the same runtime as a CD. ATRAC reduces the 1.4 Mbit/s of a CD to a 292 kbit/s data stream, roughly a 5:1 reduction. ATRAC was also used on nearly all flash memory Walkman devices until the 8 series.


title: MiniDisc

text: The ATRAC codec differs from uncompressed PCM in that it is a psychoacoustic lossy audio data reduction scheme. Like other lossy audio compression formats, it is intended to be acoustically transparent, but some listeners claim to be able to hear audible artifacts.


title: MiniDisc

text: There have been four versions of the ATRAC codec, each claimed by Sony to more accurately reflect the original audio. Early version players are guaranteed to play later version ATRAC audio. Version 1 could only be copied on consumer equipment three or four times before artifacts became objectionable, as the ATRAC on the recording machine attempts to data reduce the already reduced signal. By version 4, the potential number of generations of copy had increased to around 15 to 20 depending on audio content.


title: MiniDisc

text: The latest versions of Sony's ATRAC are ATRAC3 and ATRAC3plus. Original ATRAC3 at 132 kbit/s (also known as ATRAC-LP2 mode) is the format that used to be used by Sony's now-defunct Connect audio download store. ATRAC3plus was not used in order to retain backwards compatibility with earlier NetMD players.


title: MiniDisc

text: In the MiniDisc's final iteration, Hi-MD, uncompressed CD-quality linear PCM audio recording and playback is offered, placing Hi-MD on a par with CD-quality audio. Hi-MD also supports both ATRAC3 and ATRAC3plus at various bitrates, but not the original ATRAC.


title: MiniDisc

text: MiniDisc has a feature that prevents disc skipping under all but the most extreme conditions. Older CD players had once been a source of annoyance to users as they were prone to mistracking from vibration and shock. MiniDisc solved this problem by reading the data into a memory buffer at a higher speed than was required before being read out to the digital-to-analog converter at the standard rate required by the format. The size of the buffer varies by model.


title: MiniDisc

text: If a MiniDisc player is bumped, playback continues unimpeded while the laser repositions itself to continue reading data from the disc. This feature allows the player to stop the spindle motor for long periods, increasing battery life.


title: MiniDisc

text: A buffer of at least six seconds is required on all MiniDisc players, be they portable or stationary full-sized units. This is needed to ensure uninterrupted playback in the presence of disc fragmentation.


title: MiniDisc

text: The data structure and operation of a MiniDisc is similar to that of a computer's hard disk drive. The bulk of the disc contains audio data, and a small section contains the table of contents (TOC), providing the playback device with vital information about the number and location of tracks on the disc. Tracks and discs can be named. Tracks may easily be added, erased, combined and divided, and their preferred order of playback modified. Erased tracks are not actually physically erased at the time, but are marked as deleted. When a disc becomes full, the recorder can simply slot track data into sections where erased tracks reside. This can lead to some fragmentation but unless many erasures and replacements are performed, the only likely problem is excessive searching, reducing battery life.


title: MiniDisc

text: The data structure of the MiniDisc, where music is recorded in a single stream of bytes while the TOC contains pointers to track positions, allows for gapless playback of music, something which the majority of competing portable players, including most MP3 players, fail to implement properly. Notable exceptions are CD players, as well as all recent iPods.


title: MiniDisc

text: At the end of recording, after the "Stop" button has been pressed, the MiniDisc may continue to write music data for a few seconds from its memory buffers. During this time, it may display a message ("Data Save", on at least some models) and the case will not open. After the audio data is written out, the final step is to write the TOC track denoting the start and endpoints of the recorded data. Sony notes in the manual that one should not interrupt the power or expose the unit to undue physical shock during this period.


title: MiniDisc

text: All MiniDisc recorders use the SCMS copy protection system which uses two bits in the S/PDIF digital audio stream and on disc to differentiate between "protected" vs. "unprotected" audio, and between "original" vs. "copy":


title: MiniDisc

text: Recording from an analogue source resulted in a disc marked "protected" and "original" allowing one further copy to be made (this contrasts with the SCMS on the Digital Compact Cassette where analogue recording was marked as "unprotected").


title: MiniDisc

text: In recorders that could be connected to a PC via USB, although it was possible to transfer audio from the PC to the MiniDisc recorder, for many years it was not possible to transfer audio the other way. This restriction existed in both the SonicStage software and in the MiniDisc player itself. SonicStage V3.4 was the first version of the software where this restriction was removed, but it still required a MiniDisc recorder/player that also had the restriction removed. The Hi-MD model MZ-RH1 was the only such player available.


title: MiniDisc

text: MD Data, a version for storing computer data, was announced by Sony in 1993 but never gained significant ground. Its media were incompatible with standard audio MiniDiscs, which has been cited as one of the main reasons behind the format's failure. MD Data can not write to audio MDs, only the considerably more expensive data blanks. It did see some success in a small number of multi-track recorders such as Sony's MDM-X4, Tascam's 564 (which could also record using standard audio MD discs, albeit only two tracks), and Yamaha's MD8, MD4, & MD4S.


title: MiniDisc

text: In 1997, MD Data2 blanks were introduced with 650 MB. They were only implemented in Sony's short-lived MD-based camcorder, the DCM-M1.


title: MiniDisc

text: In 2000, Sony announced MDLP (MiniDisc Long Play), which added new recording modes based on a new codec called ATRAC3. In addition to the standard, high-quality mode, now called SP, MDLP adds LP2 mode, which allows double the recording time – 160 minutes on an 80-minute disc – of good-quality stereo sound, and LP4, which allows four times more recording time – 320 minutes on an 80-minute disc – of medium-quality stereo sound.


title: MiniDisc

text: The bitrate of the standard SP mode is 292 kbit/s, and it uses separate stereo coding with discrete left and right channels. LP2 mode uses a bitrate of 132 kbit/s and also uses separate stereo coding. The last mode, LP4, has a bitrate of 66 kbit/s and uses joint stereo coding. The sound quality is noticeably poorer than the first two modes, but is sufficient for many uses.


title: MiniDisc

text: NetMD recorders allow music files to be transferred from a computer to a recorder (but not in the other direction) over a USB connection. In LP4 mode, speeds of up to 32× real-time are possible and three Sony NetMD recorders (MZ-N10, MZ-N910, and MZ-N920) are capable of speeds up to 64× real-time. NetMD recorders all support MDLP.


title: MiniDisc

text: When transferring music in SP mode using NetMD with SonicStage, what is transferred is in fact padded LP2. That is to say that the quality of the music is that of LP2 but recorded as SP.


title: MiniDisc

text: NetMD is a proprietary protocol, and it is currently impossible to use it without proprietary software, such as SonicStage. Thus, it cannot be used with non-Windows machines. A free *nix based implementation, libnetmd, has been developed. In 2019 a coder named Stefano Brilli compiled the linux-minidisc CLI into a web browser-based application, allowing users to transfer music via USB to modern devices. The libnetmd allows the user to upload SP files in full quality.


title: MiniDisc

text: Hi-MD is the further development of the MiniDisc format. Hi-MD media will not play on non-Hi-MD equipment, including NetMD players. The Hi-MD format, introduced in 2004, marked a return to the data storage arena with its 1 GB discs and ability to act as a USB drive. Hi-MD units allow the recording and playback of audio and data on the same disc, and can write both audio and data to standard MiniDisc media – an 80-minute MiniDisc blank could be formatted to store 305 MB of data.


title: MiniDisc

text: Modes marked in green are available for recordings made on the player, while those marked in red are available for music transferred from a PC. Capacities are official Sony figures; real world figures are usually slightly higher. Native MP3 support was added in second-generation Hi-MD players in the spring of 2005. SonicStage version 3.4, released in Feb 2006, introduced ripping CDs in bitrates 320 and 352 and added track transfer in ATRAC 192kbps to Hi-MD devices.


title: Aurvandill

text: Aurvandill (Old Norse) is a figure in Germanic mythology. In Norse mythology, the god Thor tosses Aurvandill's toe – which had frozen while the thunder god was carrying him in a basket across the Élivágar rivers – into the sky to form a star called ' ('Aurvandill's toe'). In wider medieval Germanic-speaking cultures, he was known as in Old English, in Old High German, in Lombardic, and possibly as in Gothic. An Old Danish Latinized version, Horwendillus (Ørvendil), is also the name given to the father of "Amlethus" (Amleth) in Saxo Grammaticus' "Gesta Danorum". Comparative studies of the various myths where the figure is involved have led scholars to reconstruct a Common Germanic mythical figure named ', which seems to have personified the 'rising light' of the morning, possibly the Morning Star (Venus). However, the German and – to a lesser extent – the Old Danish evidence remain difficult to interpret in this model.


title: Aurvandill

text: The Old Norse name ' stems from a Proto-Germanic form reconstructed as ', ', or '. It is cognate with Old English ', Old High German ' (≈ '), and Lombardic '. The Gothic word "", translating the Koine Greek ("eosphoros", 'dawnbringer'), may also be related.


title: Aurvandill

text: The original meaning of the Common Germanic name remains obscure. The most semantically plausible explanation is to interpret ' as a compound meaning 'light-beam' or 'ray of light', by deriving the prefix '- from Proto-Germanic ' ('shiny, shiny liquid'; cf. ON ' 'gold', OE ' 'wave, sea'), and ' from ' ('rod, cane'; cf. Goth. ', ON '). This theory is encouraged by the Old English association of the idea of 'rising light' with ', whose name has been translated as 'radiance, morning star', or as 'dawn, ray of light'.


title: Aurvandill

text: Alternatively, the Old Norse prefix ' has also been interpreted as coming from Proto-Germanic ' ('mud, gravel, sediment'; cf. ON ' 'wet clay, mud', OE ' 'earth'), with "" being rendered as 'gravel-beam' or 'swamp-wand'. According to philologist Christopher R. Fee, this may imply the idea a phallic figure related to fertility, the name of his spouse in the Old Norse myth, Gróa, literally meaning 'Growth'.


title: Aurvandill

text: In less frequent scholarly interpretations, the second element has also been derived by some researchers from ' ('Vandal'; i.e. 'the shining Vandal'), from a stem ' ('beard'), or else compared to a Norse word for "sword".


title: Aurvandill

text: Commentators since at least the time of Jacob Grimm's "Deutsche Mythologie", first published in 1835, have emphasized the great age of the tradition reflected in the mythological material surrounding this name, without being able to fully reconstruct the motifs of a Common Germanic myth. The task is complicated because the mythical stories of Orendel and Horwendillus appear to be unrelated to that of Ēarendel and Aurvandill. However, some scholars, including Georges Dumézil, have attempted to demonstrate that Saxo's Horwendillus and Snorri's Aurvandill are based on the same archetypal myth. Furthermore, the apparent discrepancies may be explained by the fact that derivatives of ' were also used as personal names in the Lombardic and German traditions, as attested by historical figures who are named ' and "" by the 8th century AD. Thus, the "Orendel" of the Middle High German myth may have been a different figure sharing the same name.


title: Aurvandill

text: At any rate, scholars Rudolf Simek and John Lindow contend that the linguistic relation between the Old Norse and Old English names may suggest a Common Germanic origin of the myth despite the absence of Aurvandill from the Poetic Edda. They argue that Aurvendill was probably already connected with a star in the original myth, but that Snorri may have modelled the story of " ('Auvandill's Toe') on the tale of the stars emerging from Þjazi's eyes while Thor throws them into the sky.


title: Aurvandill

text: The Old Norse " is mentioned once in Norse mythology, in "Skáldskaparmál", a book of Snorri Sturluson's 13th-century "Prose Edda", where he is described as the husband of the witch Gróa:


title: Aurvandill

text: Thor went home to Thrúdvangar, and the hone remained sticking in his head. Then came the wise woman who was called Gróa, wife of Aurvandill the Valiant: she sang her spells over Thor until the hone was loosened. But when Thor knew that, and thought that there was hope that the hone might be removed, he desired to reward Gróa for her leech-craft and make her glad, and told her these things: that he had waded from the north over Icy Stream and had borne Aurvandill in a basket on his back from the north out of Jötunheim. And he added for a token, that one of Aurvandill's toes had stuck out of the basket, and became frozen; wherefore Thor broke it off and cast it up into the heavens, and made thereof the star called Aurvandill's Toe. Thor said that it would not be long ere Aurvandill came home: but Gróa was so rejoiced that she forgot her incantations, and the hone was not loosened, and stands yet in Thor's head. Therefore it is forbidden to cast a hone across the floor, for then the hone is stirred in Thor's head.


title: Aurvandill

text: This passage seems to be part of a larger story where Aurvandill is abducted by the jǫtnar; the thunder-god Thor confronts one of them (Hrungnir in Snorri's version) and eventually liberates Aurvandill, but leaves the scene with the weapon of the jǫtunn stuck in his head.


title: Aurvandill

text: At the end of the story, Aurvandill's frost-bitten toe is made into a new star by Thor. However, it is not clear what celestial object is indicated in this passage. Guesses as to the identity of this star have included Sirius, the planet Venus, or the blue-white star Rigel, which could be viewed as forming the foot of the constellation Orion.


title: Aurvandill

text: The oldest attestation of this name may occur in the "Gothica Bononiensia", a sermon from Ostrogothic Italy written in the Gothic language not later than the first half of the 6th century, and discovered in 2009. On folio 2 recto, in the context of a quotation from , linguist P. A. Kerkhof suggested to see the word ("auzandil") in a difficult-to-read part of the palimpsest. This reading, which has been accepted by various experts such as Carla Falluomini and Roland Schuhmann, translates the Koine Greek word ("heōsphóros", 'dawnbringer') from the Septuagint, which in Latin is rendered "lucifer" ('light-bringer, morning star'):


title: Aurvandill

text: The term ' (≈ ', ') appears only seven times in the Old English corpus, where it is used in certain contexts to interpret the Latin ' ('rising sun'), ' ('light-bringer'), ' ('dawn') or ' ('radiance'). According to scholar J. E. Cross, textual evidence indicate that it originally meant 'coming or rising light, beginning of light, bringer of light', and that later innovations led to an extended meaning of 'radiance, light'. In the words of philologist Tiffany Beechy, the "Anglo-Saxons appear to have known ' as a quasi-mythological figure who personified a natural phenomenon (sunrise) and an astrological/astronomical object (the morning star)."


title: Aurvandill

text: The lines 104–108 of the Old English poem "Crist I" ("Christ I") describe the coming of Ēarendel to the earth:


title: Aurvandill

text: The impetus of the poem comes from the Latin Advent antiphon: ' – "O Orient/Rising One, splendour of eternal light and sun of justice: come and illuminate one sitting in darkness and the shadow of death". Scholars agree that ' was chosen in "Crist I" as an equivalent of the Latin "", understood in a religious-poetic context as the 'source of true light', 'the fount of light', and the 'light (which) rises from the Orient'.


title: Aurvandill

text: Ēarendel is traditionally taken to personify in "Crist I" either John the Baptist or Christ himself, figuring him as the rising sun, morning star, or dawn. He is portrayed in the poem as the "true(st) light of the sun" (') and the "brightest of angels [≈ messengers]" ('), implying the idea of a heavenly or divine radiance physically and metaphorically sent over the earth for the benefit of mankind. The lines 107b–8 ("), translated as "all spans of time you, of yourself, enlighten always", or as "you constantly enlighten all seasons by your presence", may also suggest that Ēarendel exists in the poem as an eternal figure situated outside of time, and as the very force that makes time and its perception possible.


title: Aurvandill

text: Beechy argues that the expression ' ('O ') could be an Old English poetic stock formula, as it finds "phonetic-associative echoes" in the expressions ' and " from the Durham Hymnal Gloss.


title: Aurvandill

text: also appears in the "Blickling Homilies" (10th c. AD), where he is explicitly identified with John the Baptist:


title: Aurvandill

text: The passage is based on a Latin sermon by the 5th-century Archbishop of Ravenna Petrus Chrysologus: ' – "But since he is about to appear, now let John spring forth, because the birth of Christ follows closely; let the new Lucifer arise, because now the light of the true Sun is breaking forth". Since the Old English version is close to the original Latin, ' can be clearly identified in the "Blickling Homilies" with "lucifer", meaning in liturgical language the 'light bearer, the planet Venus as morning star, the sign auguring the birth of Christ'. In this context, "" is to be understood as the morning star, the light whose rising signifies Christ’s birth, and whose appearance comes in the poem before the "gleam of the true Sun, God himself".


title: Aurvandill

text: In the Durham Hymnal Gloss (early 11th c. AD), the term ' is used in specific contexts to gloss the Latin "aurora" ('dawn; east, orient') instead of the more frequent equivalent "dægrima" ('dawn'), with the hymns 15.8 and 30.1 implying that ' appears "with the dawn", as the light that "quite suffuses the sky", rather than being the "dawn itself" ("the dawn comes up in its course, steps fully forth").


title: Aurvandill

text: The Épinal Glossary, written in England in the 8th century, associates ' with the Latin ' ('brightness, radiance'; especially of heavenly bodies) as an alternative to the more frequent equivalent ' (Old English: 'ray of light, gleam'). Two copies of the Épinal Glossary were made in the late 8th or early 9th century: the Épinal-Erfurt Glossary, which gives the equation ' (≈ ""), and the Corpus Glossary, redacted from an archetype of Épinal-Erfurt exemplar.


title: Aurvandill

text: The forms ' (≈ ', '), dating from the 8th century, and ' (≈ '), dating from the 9th–10th century, were used in Old High German as personal names. A Bavarian count named ' is recorded in 843.


title: Aurvandill

text: The Middle High German epic poem "Orendel", written in the late 12th century, provides a fictional account of how the Holy Mantle of Christ came to the city of Trier that was probably inspired by the actual transfer of the Mantle to the main altar of Trier Cathedral in 1196. The style of the poem, characterized by its "paratactic organization of episodes and the repetition of poetic formulas", may point to an older oral tradition. The eponymous hero of the tale, Orendel, son of King Ougel, embarks on the sea with a mighty fleet in order to reach the Holy Land and seek the hand of Bride, Queen of Jerusalem. Suffering shipwreck, Orendel is rescued by a fisherman and eventually recovers the lost Mantle in the belly of a whale. The coat provides him protection and he succeeds in winning Bride for his wife. After ruling Jerusalem with Bride for a time, the two of them meet with many adventures. At the end of the story, Orendel finally disposes of the Holy Coat after bringing it to Trier.


title: Aurvandill

text: The appendix to the "Strassburger Heldenbuch" (15th c.) names King Orendel (≈ ") of Trier as the first of the heroes that were ever born.


title: Aurvandill

text: The name also gave way to various toponyms found in present-day Germany, including ' (in Grabfeld), ' (now part of Zweiflingen), and " (in Öhringen).


title: Aurvandill

text: A Latinized version of the Old Danish name, "Horwendillus" (Ørvendil), appears in Saxo Grammaticus' "Gesta Danorum" (ca. 1200) as the father of "Amlethus" (Amlet):Now Ørvendil, after controlling the [Jutland] province for three years, had devoted himself to piracy and reaped such superlative renown that Koller, the king of Norway, wishing to rival his eminent deeds and widespread reputation, judged it would suit him very well if he could transcend him in warfare and cast a shadow over the brilliance of this world-famed sea-rover. He cruised about, combing various parts of the seas, until he lit upon Ørvendil's fleet. Each of the pirates had gained an island in the midst of the ocean and they had moored their ships on different sides. (...)


title: Aurvandill

text: Both gave and accepted their word of honour on this point and fell to battle. They were not deterred from assailing each other with their blades by the novelty of their meeting or the springtime charm of that spot, for they took no heed of these things. Ørvendil's emotional fervour made him more eager to set upon his foe than to defend himself; consequently he disregarded the protection of his shield and laid both hands to his sword. This daring had its results. His rain of blows deprived Koller of his shield by cutting it to pieces; finally he carved off the other’s foot and made him fall lifeless. He honoured their agreement by giving him a majestic funeral, constructing an ornate tomb, and providing a ceremony of great magnificence. After this he hounded down and slew Koller's sister Sæla, a warring amazon and accomplished pirate herself and skilled in the trade of fighting.


title: Aurvandill

text: Three years were passed in gallant military enterprises, in which he marked the richest and choicest of the plunder for Rørik, to bring himself into closer intimacy with the king. On the strength of their friendship Ørvendil wooed and obtained Rørik's daughter Gerutha for his bride, who bore him a son, Amleth.


title: Aurvandill

text: In view of Saxo's tendency to euhemerise and reinterpret traditional Scandinavian myths, philologist Georges Dumézil has proposed that his story was based on the same archetype as Snorri's Aurvandill. In what could be a literary inversion of the original myth, Horwendillus is portrayed as a warrior who injures and vanquishes his adversary, whereas Aurvandill was taken as a hostage by the jǫtnar and wounded during his deliverance. Dumézil also notes that, although the event does not take a cosmological turn in Saxo's version, Aurvandill's toe was broken off by Thor, while Collerus' (Koller's) entire foot is slashed off by Horwendillus.


title: Aurvandill

text: British writer J. R. R. Tolkien discovered the lines 104–105 of Cynewulf's "Crist" in 1913. According to him, the "great beauty" of the name Ēarendel, and the myth he seems to be associated with, inspired the character of Eärendil depicted in "The Silmarillion". In 1914, Tolkien published a poem originally entitled "The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star" as an account of Ēarendel's celestial course as the bright Morning-star. In a personal letter from 1967, Tolkien wrote:


title: Aurvandill

text: When first studying A[nglo]-S[axon] professionally (1913) ... I was struck by the great beauty of this word (or name), entirely coherent with the normal style of A-S, but euphonic to a peculiar degree in that pleasing but not 'delectable' language ... it at least seems certain that it belonged to astronomical-myth, and was the name of a star or star-group. Before 1914, I wrote a 'poem' upon Earendel who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun. I adopted him into my mythology in which he became a prime figure as a mariner, and eventually as a herald star, and a sign of hope to men. "Aiya Earendil Elenion Ancalima" (II 329) 'hail Earendil brightest of Stars' is derived at long remove from "Éala Éarendel engla beorhtast".


title: Aurvandill

text: Tolkien interpreted Ēarendel as a Messenger, probably inspired by his association with the word "" ('angel, messenger') in both "Crist I" and the "Blickling Homilies" , and his identification with John the Baptist in the latter text. Tolkien's depiction of Eärendil as a Herald also has echoes in the interpretation of the Old English Ēarendel as the Morning-star physically heralding the rising of the sun, which finds a figurative parallel in the "Blickling Homilies", where Ēarendel heralds the coming of the "true Sun", Christ. Another pervasive aspect of Tolkien's Eärendil is his depiction as a Mariner. Carl F. Hostetter notes that, although "the association of Eärendil with the sea was for Tolkien a deeply personal one", the Danish Horvandillus and the German Orendel are both portrayed as mariners themselves.


title: Aurvandill

text: In 2022, a group of scientists led by astronomer Brian Welch named star WHL0137-LS "Earendel" from the Old English meaning.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: The Castle (, also spelled "Das Schloß" ) is the last novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist known only as "K." arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle supposedly owned by Count Westwest.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: Kafka died before he could finish the work and the novel was posthumously published against his wishes. Dark and at times surreal, "The Castle" is often understood to be about alienation, unresponsive bureaucracy, the frustration of trying to conduct business with non-transparent, seemingly arbitrary controlling systems, and the futile pursuit of an unobtainable goal.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: Kafka began writing the novel on the evening of 27 January 1922, the day he arrived at the mountain resort of (now in the Czech Republic). A picture taken of him upon his arrival shows him by a horse-drawn sleigh in the snow in a setting reminiscent of "The Castle". Hence, the significance that the first few chapters of the handwritten manuscript were written in the first person and at some point later changed by Kafka to a third-person narrator, "K."


title: The Castle (novel)

text: Kafka died before he could finish the novel, and it is questionable whether he intended to finish it if he had survived his tuberculosis. At one point he told his friend Max Brod that the novel would conclude with K., the book's protagonist, continuing to reside in the village until his death; the castle would notify him on his deathbed that his "legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there." However, on 11 September 1922 in a letter to Brod, he wrote he was giving up on the book and would never return to it. As it is, the book ends mid-sentence.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: Although Brod was instructed by Kafka to destroy all of his unpublished works on his death, Brod instead set about publishing many of them. "" was originally published in German in 1926 by the publisher Joella Goodman of Munich. This edition sold far less than the 1500 copies that were printed. It was republished in 1935 by Schocken Verlag in Berlin, and in 1946 by Schocken Books of New York.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: Brod heavily edited the work to ready it for publication. His goal was to gain acceptance of the work and the author, not to maintain the structure of Kafka's writing. This would play heavily in the future of the translations and continues to be the center of discussion on the text. Brod donated the manuscript to Oxford University.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: Brod placed a strong religious significance on the symbolism of the castle. This is one possible interpretation of the work based on numerous Judeo-Christian references as noted by many including Arnold Heidsieck.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: The publisher soon realized the translations were "bad" and in 1940 desired a "completely different approach". In 1961 Malcolm Pasley got access to all of Kafka's works except "The Trial", and deposited them in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Pasley and a team of scholars (Gerhard Neumann, Jost Schillemeit, and Jürgen Born) started publishing the works in 1982 through S. Fischer Verlag. "" was published that year as a two-volume set — the novel in the first volume, and the fragments, deletions, and editor's notes in a second volume. This team restored the original German text to its full and incomplete state, including Kafka's unique punctuation, considered critical to the style.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: Interpretations of Kafka's intent for the manuscript are ongoing. At one time Stroemfeld/Roter Stern Verlag did work for the rights to publish a critical edition with manuscript and transcription side-by-side. But they met with resistance from the Kafka heirs and Pasley.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: The title ' may be translated as "the castle" or "the palace", but the German word is a homonym that can also refer to a lock. It is also phonetically close to ' ("conclusion" or "end"). The castle is locked and closed to K. and the townspeople; neither can gain access.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: The name of the character Klamm is similar to the word "klammer" in German, which means "clip, brace, peg, fastener" and may hold a double meaning, for Klamm is essentially the lock that locks away the secrets of the Castle and the salvation of K. In ordinary usage, "klamm" is an adjective that denotes a combination of dampness and chill (cf. English "clammy") and can be used in reference both to weather and clothing, which inscribes a sense of unease into the main character's name. In Czech, "klam" means delusion, or deceit.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: The protagonist, K., arrives in a village governed by a mysterious bureaucracy operating in a nearby castle. When seeking shelter at the town inn, he claims to be a land surveyor summoned by the castle authorities. He is quickly notified that his castle contact is an official named Klamm, who, in an introductory note, informs K. he will report to the Mayor.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: The Mayor informs K. that through a mix-up in communication between the castle and the village he was erroneously requested. But the Mayor offers him a position as a caretaker in service of the school teacher. Meanwhile, K., unfamiliar with the customs, bureaucracy and processes of the village, continues to attempt to reach Klamm, which is considered a strong taboo to the villagers.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: The villagers hold the officials and the castle in high regard, even though they do not appear to know what the officials do. The actions of the officials are never explained. The villagers provide assumptions and justification for the officials' actions through lengthy monologues. Everyone appears to have an explanation for the officials' actions, but they often contradict themselves and there is no attempt to hide the ambiguity. Instead, villagers praise it as another action or feature of an official.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: One of the more obvious contradictions between the "official word" and the village conception is the dissertation by the secretary Erlanger on Frieda's required return to service as a barmaid. K. is the only villager who knows that the request is being forced by the castle (even though Frieda may be the genesis), with no consideration of the inhabitants of the village.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: The castle is the ultimate bureaucracy with copious paperwork that the bureaucracy maintains is "flawless". But the flawlessness is a lie; it is a flaw in the paperwork that has brought K. to the village. There are other failures of the system: K. witnesses a servant destroying paperwork when he cannot determine whom the recipient should be.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: The castle's occupants appear to be all adult men, and there is little reference to the castle other than to its bureaucratic functions. The two notable exceptions are a fire brigade and that Otto Brunswick's wife declares herself to be from the castle. The latter declaration builds the importance of Hans, Otto's son, in K.'s eyes as a way to gain access to the castle officials.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: The officials have one or more secretaries that do their work in their village. Although they sometimes come to the village, they do not interact with the villagers unless they need female companionship, implied to be sexual in nature.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: Note: The Muir translations refer to the Herrenhof Inn where the Harman translations translate this to the Gentleman's Inn (while the Bell translation calls it the Castle Inn). Below, all references to the inn where the officials stay in the village is the Herrenhof Inn since this was the first, and potentially more widely read, translation.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: It is well documented that Brod's original construction was based on religious themes and this was furthered by the Muirs in their translations. But it has not ended with the Critical Editions. Numerous interpretations have been made with a variety of theological angles.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: One interpretation of K.'s struggle to contact the castle is that it represents a man's search for salvation. According to Mark Harman, translator of a recent edition of "The Castle", this was the interpretation favored by the original translators Willa Muir (helped by Edwin) who produced the first English volume in 1930. Harman feels he has removed the bias in the translations toward this view, but many still feel this is the point of the book.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: Fueling the biblical interpretations of the novel are the various names and situations. For example, the official Galater (the German word for Galatians), one of the initial regions to develop a strong Christian following from the work of Apostle Paul and his assistant Barnabas. The name of the messenger, Barnabas, for the same reason. Even the Critical Editions naming of the beginning chapter, "Arrival", among other things liken K. to an Old Testament messiah.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: The obvious thread throughout "The Castle" is bureaucracy. The extreme degree is nearly comical and the village residents' justifications of it are amazing. Hence it is no surprise that many feel that the work is a direct result of the political situation of the era in which it was written, which was shot through with anti-Semitism, remnants of the Habsburg monarchy, etc.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: But even in these analyses, the veiled references to more sensitive issues are pointed out. For instance, the treatment of the Barnabas family, with their requirement to first prove guilt before they could request a pardon from it and the way their fellow villagers desert them have been pointed out as a direct reference to the anti-Semitic climate at the time.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: In a review of the novel found in "The Guardian", William Burrows disputes the claim that "The Castle" deals with bureaucracy, claiming that this view trivialises Kafka's literary and artistic vision, while being "reductive". He claims, on the other hand, that the book is about solitude, pain, and the desire for companionship.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: Critics often talk of "The Castle" and "The Trial" in concert, highlighting the struggle of the protagonist against a bureaucratic system and standing before the law's door unable to enter as in the parable of the priest in "The Trial".


title: The Castle (novel)

text: In spite of motifs common with other works of Kafka, "The Castle" is quite different from "The Trial". While K., the main hero of "The Castle", faces similar uncertainty and difficulty in grasping the reality that suddenly surrounds him, Josef K., the protagonist of "The Trial", seems to be more experienced and emotionally stronger. On the other hand, while Josef K.'s surroundings stay familiar even when strange events befall him, K. finds himself in a new world whose laws and rules are unfamiliar to him.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: In 1930 Willa and Edwin Muir translated the First German edition of "The Castle" as it was compiled by Max Brod. It was published by Secker & Warburg in England and Alfred A. Knopf in the United States. The 1941 edition, with a homage by Thomas Mann, was the one that fed the post-war Kafka craze.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: In 1954 the "definitive" edition was published and included additional sections Brod had added to the Schocken Definitive German edition. The new sections were translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Some edits were made in the Muir text namely the changes were "Town Council" to "Village Council", "Superintendent" to "Mayor", "Clients" to "Applicants".


title: The Castle (novel)

text: The Muir translations make use of wording that is often considered "spiritual" in nature. In one notable example, the Muirs translate the description of the castle as "soaring unfalteringly" where Harman uses "tapered decisively". Furthermore, the word "illusory" is used from the opening paragraph forward. Some critics note this as further evidence of the bias in the translation leaning toward a mystical interpretation.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: In 1926 Brod persuaded Kurt Wolff to publish the first German edition of "The Castle" in his publishing house. Due to its unfinished nature and his desire to get Kafka's work published, Max Brod took some editorial freedom.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: In 1961 Malcolm Pasley was able to gain control of the manuscript, along with most of the other Kafka writings (save "The Trial") and had it placed in the Oxford's Bodleian library. There, Pasley headed a team of scholars and recompiled Kafka's works into the Critical Edition. "The Castle" Critical Edition, in German, consists of two volumes—the novel in one volume and the fragments, deletions and editor's notes in a second volume. They were published by S. Fischer Verlag in 1982, hence occasionally referred to as the "Fischer Editions".


title: The Castle (novel)

text: Mark Harman used the first volume of this set to create the 1998 edition of "The Castle", often referred to as based on the "Restored Text" or the "English Critical Edition". Unlike the Muir translation, the fragments, deletions, and editor's notes are not included. According to the publisher's note:


title: The Castle (novel)

text: We decided to omit the variants and passages deleted by Kafka that are included in Pasley's second volume, even though variants can indeed shed light on the genesis of literary texts. The chief objective of this new edition, which is intended for the general public, is to present the text in a form that is as close as possible to the state in which the author left the manuscript.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: Harman has received general acceptance of his translation as being technically accurate and true to the original German. He has, though, received criticism for, at times not creating the prosaic form of Kafka. Some of this is due, as with Muir's translations, on accusations that Pasley's compilations are also inaccurate, although better than Brod's.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: Harman includes an eleven-page discussion on his philosophy behind the translation. This section provides significant information about the method he used and his thought process. There are numerous examples of passages from Pasley, Muir's translation and his translation to provide the reader with a better feel for the work. Some feel that his (and the publisher's) praise for his work and his "patronizing" of the Muirs goes a little too far.


title: The Castle (novel)

text: A translation by Jon Calame and Seth Rogoff (edited by Anthony Northey) was published by Vitalis Verlag, Prague 2014.


title: News UK

text: News Corp UK & Ireland Limited (trading as News UK, formerly News International and NI Group) is a British newspaper publisher, and a wholly owned subsidiary of the American mass media conglomerate News Corp. It is the current publisher of "The Times", "The Sunday Times", and "The Sun" newspapers; its former publications include the "Today", "News of the World", and "The London Paper" newspapers. Until June 2002, it was called News International plc. On 31 May 2011, the company name was changed from News International Limited to NI Group Limited, and on 26 June 2013 to News UK.


title: News UK

text: Between 1987 and 1995, News International owned, through its subsidiary News (UK) Ltd, "Today", the first UK national newspaper to be printed in colour. All of News International's newspapers (with the exception of "The London Paper", launched in 2006) were founded by other owners, in some cases hundreds of years ago.


title: News UK

text: In October 2005, News International sold TSL Education, publisher of "Times Higher Education", "Times Educational Supplement", and other education titles, for £235m ($415m). "The Times Literary Supplement", previously part of TSL Education, was retained by News International as part of the deal. Darwin Ltd, which had taken over the company, continued to produce the same product.


title: News UK

text: In July 2009, "The Guardian", a newspaper owned by Guardian Media Group, reported that News Group Newspapers paid in excess of £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal News Group journalists' use on repeated occasions of illegal methods in the pursuit of stories. It has been alleged that News Group staff were accused of engaging in phone hacking, including Clive Goodman, illegally accessed voicemail for the mobile phones of thousands of public figures, including politicians and celebrities. Goodman was jailed in 2007 for tapping the mobile phones of three members of the royal staff; this is an offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. It was stated by News International at the time that Goodman had acted without its knowledge, and that no other News International journalists made use of such methods.


title: News UK

text: The evidence uncovered by "The Guardian" showed that many more figures were in fact the subject of phone-taps, including Nigella Lawson, Lenny Henry, Gwyneth Paltrow, John Prescott, Boris Johnson, and Tessa Jowell. In 2008, the "News of the World" paid in excess of £400,000 in damages to Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, who was suing the newspaper for its involvement in the illegal interception of messages to his mobile phone. According to "The Guardian", this payment, made in exchange for Taylor's silence, "prevented the public from knowing anything about the hundreds of pages of evidence which had been disclosed in Taylor's case".


title: News UK

text: In contrast to News International's earlier denials of knowledge, "The Guardian" cites suppressed evidence revealing that "News of the World"s editorial staff were involved with private investigators who engaged in illegal phone-hacking, and that both reporters and executives were commissioning purchases of confidential information; this is illegal unless it is shown to be in the public interest. Apparently these activities were well known within the "News of the World", being "openly paid for by the accounts department with invoices which itemised illegal acts". The paperwork was alleged to show the above occurred during the tenure of Andy Coulson, who was chief press advisor to David Cameron, leader of the UK's Conservative Party, until his resignation on 21 January 2011.


title: News UK

text: On 4 July, "The Guardian" reported that a private investigator at the "News of the World" had hacked into the phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler, causing both her parents and police investigating her murder to wrongly believe she was still alive. This occurred during the period that Rebekah Brooks ("née" Wade) was editor.


title: News UK

text: On 7 July, British newspaper "The Daily Telegraph" alleged that the families of dead British service personnel were targeted by private investigators working for the "News of the World". This led to The Royal British Legion severing ties with the paper until such allegations are proved false. On the same day, James Murdoch announced the "News of the World" would be shut down after the publication of one more edition on 10 July 2011, due to the allegations. The newspaper had already been faced with the withdrawal of a number of sponsors which had advertised their products and services in the newspaper, not to mention the inevitable fall in sales that the newspaper would have faced had it remained in circulation.


title: News UK

text: On 15 July, Rebekah Brooks resigned as chief executive of News International. She commented thus on her departure:


title: News UK

text: "The Guardian" newspaper, citing official company accounts, claims Brooks received a £10.8m payoff for leaving News International.


title: News UK

text: The company's major titles are published by subsidiary companies, Times Newspapers Ltd and News Group Newspapers. Until 2010, these newspapers were written at a large site in Wapping in east London, near Tower Hill, which earned the nickname "Fortress Wapping" after a fierce dispute with the union to which the workforce had previously belonged. The printing of the papers is now undertaken at plants in Waltham Cross, Knowsley, and Lanarkshire (the latter said by Rupert Murdoch, on the plant's opening in 2007, to be "the largest and fastest print press in the world").


title: News UK

text: The News Building, where all of News UK's London operations are based, was opened on 16 September 2014 by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.


title: News UK

text: Times Newspapers Limited publishes the compact daily newspaper "The Times" and the broadsheet "The Sunday Times".


title: News UK

text: Times Newspapers was formed in 1967 when the Thomson Corporation purchased "The Times" from the Astor family and merged it with "The Sunday Times", which it had owned since 1959. The company was purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News International in February 1981. The acquisition followed an intense 21 days of negotiations with the print unions, conducted by John Collier and Bill O'Neill. "The Times Literary Supplement", "Times Educational Supplement" and "Times Higher Education Supplement" were also part of the group; the latter two publications have since been sold.


title: News UK

text: An American edition of "The Times" was launched in New York City, Boston and some other East Coast U.S. cities in 2006.


title: News UK

text: Rupert Murdoch has stated that the law and the independent board prevent him from exercising editorial control. However, an article in "The Spectator" following the resignation of James Harding stated that the trust has "never played much of a role in the 30 years Murdoch has owned the paper", and suggested that Murdoch had pressurised Harding to resign.


title: News UK

text: News Group Newspapers Ltd publishes the tabloid newspaper "The Sun". The "News of the World" was another tabloid newspaper owned by the company; however, its closure was announced on 7 July 2011, following new evidence about a phone hacking scandal at the newspaper. The final issue was released on 10 July 2011.


title: News UK

text: The "News of the World" was purchased by Murdoch in January 1969. "The Sun" was acquired in October 1969 from International Publishing Corporation.


title: News UK

text: Murdoch states that he acts as a "traditional proprietor"; exercising editorial control on major issues, such as which political party to back in a general election or policy on Europe.


title: News UK

text: "The London Paper" was the first newspaper to be launched by News International rather than bought. It was an evening freesheet distributed at bus and rail stations in London. It was published five days a week from September 2006 to September 2009, when it closed down, faced with competition from other free papers.


title: News UK

text: In 2016, News UK acquired Wireless Group Limited, the operator of a number of radio stations across the United Kingdom and Ireland.


title: News UK

text: In December 2020, Ofcom granted a licence to News UK & Ireland Limited to operate a new television channel on satellite and cable (not to be confused with Andrew Neil's GB News, which is a separate news channel launched in June 2021). News UK TV was then overseen by David Rhodes, who was previously a Fox News executive and president of CBS News.


title: News UK

text: Unlike GB News, News UK TV is not expected to take up a slot on Freeview with its nightly programming (expected to be a few hours a night, according to Andrew Neil on BBC Radio 4's "The Media Show", 12 March 2021) being streamed via a number of platforms.


title: News UK

text: In April 2021, News UK CEO Rebekah Brooks announced that plans for the new service had been much reduced, as a British equivalent of Fox was considered unviable, and programming would only be available via streaming. David Rhodes is to return to the United States in June.


title: News UK

text: In September 2021, a few days after Neil resigned as chairman of rival GB News, it was reported that the News UK's channel would now be called TalkTV (after the radio stations TalkRadio and talkSport) and that Piers Morgan would be a presenter on the new service. In addition, News UK have decided that TalkTV would be available on FreeSat, Freeview, Sky UK and Virgin Media (if slots can be acquired by the company) and that the channel would feature current affairs documentaries, programmes about sport and entertainment features.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: The Captive, formerly Queen of the Night and Captives, is a 2014 Canadian thriller film directed by Atom Egoyan with a script he co-wrote with David Fraser. The film stars Ryan Reynolds, Bruce Greenwood, Scott Speedman, Rosario Dawson, Mireille Enos, Kevin Durand, and Alexia Fast. It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in the main competition section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. The film was released in select theaters and on demand on December 12, 2014.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: The film has a nonlinear presentation, and only context differentiates the current scenes from the flashbacks. Additionally, although the film takes place over eight years, all of the scenes take place during winter for dramatic effect.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: In Niagara Falls, Ontario, homicide detective Jeffrey Cornwall interviews for a job with Nicole Dunlop in the Internet Child Exploitation Unit. He recoils in disgust after seeing the images related to an open case, but Nicole advises him these are the types of images he will have to see every day and not look away from.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: Meanwhile, local contractor Matthew Lane picks up his 9-year-old daughter, Cassandra, after her figure skating practice. Matthew stops to pick up pie, leaving Cassandra in his truck. Minutes later, he returns to find her missing. He reports the abduction to the police station, where Jeffrey and Nicole are assigned to the case. They are skeptical of his story, which infuriates him. Cassandra's mother, Tina Lane, arrives and breaks down in rage at Matthew.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: Eight years later, Matthew and Tina are estranged; she blames him for Cassandra's disappearance. Nicole and Jeffrey are now romantically involved. Tina meets with the police regularly to discuss their case but Matthew, originally a suspect, has become a vigilante in the search for Cassandra.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: This entire time Cassandra has been held captive in the home of a child pornographer named Mika, who has installed remote cameras in the hotel rooms where Tina works as a chambermaid. Although Mika leaves his house to work and is no longer sexually interested in the now-teenaged Cassandra, the fear that he will harm her parents keeps Cassandra from escaping or seeking help.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: Jeffrey finds recent photos of Cassandra online. Mika makes her tell stories on camera to lure in younger children. Nicole poses as a child, which allows her and Jeffrey to catch a child molester named Willy, as well as a group of others. The arrests put Nicole into the public eye. Mika visits Willy in prison and urges him not to take any deals for cooperation. Willy says he will only comply if someone kidnaps Nicole and forces her to reveal what in her past may have inspired her to pursue child protection.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: Cassandra begins chatting online with a young girl, trying to entice her to meet. When Nicole arrives home, she finds Jeffrey using his own niece as bait to infiltrate the child porn community and immediately shuts off the web cam. Mika secretly turns the webcam back on to watch their fight and reconsiders Willy's offer regarding Nicole.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: Nicole attends a dinner held in her honor where she is drugged and kidnapped by Vicky, a woman working for Mika.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: While transporting trees in his truck, Matthew stays overnight at a motel. He wakes to find the trees have been taken and left in a trail that ultimately leads him to a remote location where he finds Cassandra. Cassandra resists leaving with him and Matthew does not understand why until Mika appears and tranquilizes him; Mika had arranged the meeting to watch their reunion.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: At the ice skating rink, Vicky questions Cassandra's former skating partner, Albert, about their history, pressuring him for details on how he was impacted by the disappearance. Matthew overhears this and follows Vicky to a restaurant, where he eavesdrops as Vicky plays a recording of her conversation with Albert for Mika. Matthew calls Jeffrey with their location and plants his phone's GPS on Mika's vehicle.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: Matthew goads the diner staff to call the police by being disruptive. He confronts the abductors to buy more time and steals Vicky's cell phone. She and Mika chase Matthew in their vehicle, shooting at his truck. Matthew escapes by driving by the diner again, where multiple police cars have responded to the staff's earlier calls.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: Jeffrey tracks Matthew's phone and locates Mika's house. Jeffrey is shot by Vicky before he kills her and fatally wounds Mika, who dies while being interrogated for Nicole's location. The Lane family is reunited at the police station and visit Jeffrey as he recovers in the hospital. The police finally find and rescue Nicole.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: The shooting of the film began in February 2013 in Sudbury, Ontario. Ahead of its première on 16 May 2014 at the Cannes Film Festival, distributor A24, in partnership with DirecTV, purchased the U.S. rights to the film.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: Before its release, the film had been received negatively. Justin Chang from "Variety" described it as "a ludicrous abduction thriller that finds a once-great filmmaker slipping into previously un-entered realms of self-parody". Peter Bradshaw from "The Guardian" commented, "it looks worryingly as if Egoyan has taken a serious issue and burdened it to breaking point and beyond with his own indulgent, naïve and exploitative fantasies". Steven Zeitchik of the "Los Angeles Times" compliments moments when the film "hints at emotions and mysteries with a delightful subtlety for a while", but remarks that it includes "some wild plots and conspiracies that wouldn't be out of place in the most fantastical spy novel".


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: The film has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 29% based on 55 reviews, with an average score of 4.3/10. The website's critics consensus states: "Wan and lugubrious, "The Captive" represents another atmospheric, beautifully filmed misfire from director Atom Egoyan." The film's Metacritic score is 36 out of 100 based on 20 reviews.


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: The film received a limited release in Canada on September 5, 2014 and earned a total of $450,000. The film was released on DirecTV


title: The Captive (2014 film)

text: on November 13, 2014 due to A24's partnership with DirecTV. The film was released in select theaters and on demand beginning on December 12, 2014 in the United States. The film is released on Netflix streaming.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the computational problem of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent's location within it. While this initially appears to be a chicken-and-egg problem, there are several algorithms known for solving it in, at least approximately, tractable time for certain environments. Popular approximate solution methods include the particle filter, extended Kalman filter, covariance intersection, and GraphSLAM. SLAM algorithms are based on concepts in computational geometry and computer vision, and are used in robot navigation, robotic mapping and odometry for virtual reality or augmented reality.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: SLAM algorithms are tailored to the available resources and are not aimed at perfection but at operational compliance. Published approaches are employed in self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous underwater vehicles, planetary rovers, newer domestic robots and even inside the human body.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: Given a series of controls formula_1 and sensor observations formula_2 over discrete time steps formula_3, the SLAM problem is to compute an estimate of the agent's state formula_4 and a map of the environment formula_5. All quantities are usually probabilistic, so the objective is to compute:


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: Applying Bayes' rule gives a framework for sequentially updating the location posteriors, given a map and a transition function formula_7,


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: Like many inference problems, the solutions to inferring the two variables together can be found, to a local optimum solution, by alternating updates of the two beliefs in a form of an expectation–maximization algorithm.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: Statistical techniques used to approximate the above equations include Kalman filters and particle filters. They provide an estimation of the posterior probability distribution for the pose of the robot and for the parameters of the map. Methods which conservatively approximate the above model using covariance intersection are able to avoid reliance on statistical independence assumptions to reduce algorithmic complexity for large-scale applications. Other approximation methods achieve improved computational efficiency by using simple bounded-region representations of uncertainty.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: They provide a set which encloses the pose of the robot and a set approximation of the map. Bundle adjustment, and more generally Maximum a posteriori estimation (MAP), is another popular technique for SLAM using image data, which jointly estimates poses and landmark positions, increasing map fidelity, and is used in commercialized SLAM systems such as Google's ARCore which replaces their previous augmented reality project 'Tango'. MAP estimators compute the most likely explanation of the robot poses and the map given the sensor data, rather than trying to estimate the entire posterior probability.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: New SLAM algorithms remain an active research area, and are often driven by differing requirements and assumptions about the types of maps, sensors and models as detailed below. Many SLAM systems can be viewed as combinations of choices from each of these aspects.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: Topological maps are a method of environment representation which capture the connectivity (i.e., topology) of the environment rather than creating a geometrically accurate map. Topological SLAM approaches have been used to enforce global consistency in metric SLAM algorithms.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: In contrast, grid maps use arrays (typically square or hexagonal) of discretized cells to represent a topological world, and make inferences about which cells are occupied. Typically the cells are assumed to be statistically independent in order to simplify computation. Under such assumption, formula_10 are set to 1 if the new map's cells are consistent with the observation formula_2 at location formula_4 and 0 if inconsistent.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: Modern self driving cars mostly simplify the mapping problem to almost nothing, by making extensive use of highly detailed map data collected in advance. This can include map annotations to the level of marking locations of individual white line segments and curbs on the road. Location-tagged visual data such as Google's StreetView may also be used as part of maps. Essentially such systems simplify the SLAM problem to a simpler localization only task, perhaps allowing for moving objects such as cars and people only to be updated in the map at runtime.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: SLAM will always use several different types of sensors, and the powers and limits of various sensor types have been a major driver of new algorithms. Statistical independence is the mandatory requirement to cope with metric bias and with noise in measurements. Different types of sensors give rise to different SLAM algorithms whose assumptions are most appropriate to the sensors. At one extreme, laser scans or visual features provide details of many points within an area, sometimes rendering SLAM inference unnecessary because shapes in these point clouds can be easily and unambiguously aligned at each step via image registration. At the opposite extreme, tactile sensors are extremely sparse as they contain only information about points very close to the agent, so they require strong prior models to compensate in purely tactile SLAM. Most practical SLAM tasks fall somewhere between these visual and tactile extremes.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: Sensor models divide broadly into landmark-based and raw-data approaches. Landmarks are uniquely identifiable objects in the world whose location can be estimated by a sensor—such as wifi access points or radio beacons. Raw-data approaches make no assumption that landmarks can be identified, and instead model formula_13 directly as a function of the location.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: Optical sensors may be one-dimensional (single beam) or 2D- (sweeping) laser rangefinders, 3D High Definition LiDAR, 3D Flash LIDAR, 2D or 3D sonar sensors and one or more 2D cameras. Since 2005, there has been intense research into VSLAM (visual SLAM) using primarily visual (camera) sensors, because of the increasing ubiquity of cameras such as those in mobile devices. Visual and Lidar sensors are informative enough to allow for landmark extraction in many cases. Other recent forms of SLAM include tactile SLAM (sensing by local touch only), radar SLAM, acoustic SLAM, and wifi-SLAM (sensing by strengths of nearby wifi access points). Recent approaches apply quasi-optical wireless ranging for multi-lateration (RTLS) or multi-angulation in conjunction with SLAM as a tribute to erratic wireless measures. A kind of SLAM for human pedestrians uses a shoe mounted inertial measurement unit as the main sensor and relies on the fact that pedestrians are able to avoid walls to automatically build floor plans of buildings by an indoor positioning system.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: For some outdoor applications, the need for SLAM has been almost entirely removed due to high precision differential GPS sensors. From a SLAM perspective, these may be viewed as location sensors whose likelihoods are so sharp that they completely dominate the inference. However, GPS sensors may occasionally decline or go down entirely, e.g. during times of military conflict, which are of particular interest to some robotics applications.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: The formula_7 term represents the kinematics of the model, which usually include information about action commands given to a robot. As a part of the model, the kinematics of the robot is included, to improve estimates of sensing under conditions of inherent and ambient noise. The dynamic model balances the contributions from various sensors, various partial error models and finally comprises in a sharp virtual depiction as a map with the location and heading of the robot as some cloud of probability. Mapping is the final depicting of such model, the map is either such depiction or the abstract term for the model.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: For 2D robots, the kinematics are usually given by a mixture of rotation and "move forward" commands, which are implemented with additional motor noise. Unfortunately the distribution formed by independent noise in angular and linear directions is non-Gaussian, but is often approximated by a Gaussian. An alternative approach is to ignore the kinematic term and read odometry data from robot wheels after each command—such data may then be treated as one of the sensors rather than as kinematics.


title: Simultaneous localization and mapping

text: An extension of the common SLAM problem has been applied to the acoustic domain, where environments are represented by the three-dimensional (3D) position of sound sources, termed. Early implementations of this technique have utilized Direction-of-Arrival (DoA) estimates of the sound source location, and rely on principal techniques of Sound localization to determine source locations. An observer, or robot must be equipped with a microphone array to enable use of Acoustic SLAM, so that DoA features are properly estimated. Acoustic SLAM has paved foundations for further studies in acoustic scene mapping, and can play an important role in human-robot interaction through speech. In order to map multiple, and occasionally intermittent sound sources, an Acoustic SLAM system utilizes foundations in Random Finite Set theory to handle the varying presence of acoustic landmarks. However, the nature of acoustically derived features leaves Acoustic SLAM susceptible to problems of reverberation, inactivity, and noise within an environment.