title: Slalom skiing

text: The downside of the shorter skis was that athletes found that recoveries were more difficult with a smaller platform underfoot. Out of concern for the safety of athletes, the FIS began to set minimum ski lengths for international slalom competition. The minimum was initially set at for men and for women, but was increased to for men and for women for the 2003–2004 season.


title: Slalom skiing

text: The equipment minimums and maximums imposed by the International Ski Federation (FIS) have created a backlash from skiers, suppliers, and fans. The main objection is that the federation is regressing the equipment, and hence the sport, by two decades.


title: Slalom skiing

text: American Bode Miller hastened the shift to the shorter, more radical sidecut skis when he achieved unexpected success after becoming the first Junior Olympic athlete to adopt the equipment in giant slalom and super-G in 1996. A few years later, the technology was adapted to slalom skis as well.


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: Boys and Girls is a 2000 American comedy film directed by Robert Iscove. The two main characters, Ryan (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Jennifer (Claire Forlani), meet each other initially as adolescents, and later realize that their lives are intertwined through fate.


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: 12-year-old Jennifer Burrows and 11-year-old Ryan Walker meet aboard an airplane and are immediately at odds. Four years later, Ryan is the mascot at his high school, while Jennifer is elected Homecoming Queen at hers. During the halftime ceremony between their two schools, Ryan is chased by the rival mascot and loses his mascot head, only to find it run over by Jennifer's ceremonial car. Jennifer later finds Ryan and tries to console him about his costume. They part ways once more, realizing they are too different.


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: A year later, Ryan and Jennifer are students at UC Berkeley. Ryan is in a steady relationship with his high school sweetheart Betty, and Jennifer is living with a musician. Ryan and Betty break up after realizing their differences. Ryan meets his roommate Hunter, aka Steve, a self-described ladies' man with countless elaborate (and unsuccessful) ploys for sleeping with women.


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: Jennifer moves in with her best friend Amy after she and her boyfriend break up. Ryan and Amy start going out, and he renews his friendship with Jennifer, even after Amy has her "breakup" with him for her. They take walks, console each other over break-ups, and gradually become best friends. Jennifer even talks Ryan into dating again, as he starts seeing a girl named Megan.


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: One night, in a cynical mood towards love, Jennifer breaks down and Ryan tries to console her. To their equal surprise, they have sex. Afraid of commitment, Jennifer says that sleeping together was a mistake, and that they should pretend it never happened. Hurt and lovesick, Ryan breaks up with Megan and withdraws into his studies.


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: As months pass, Jennifer graduates and readies herself to travel to Italy. She encounters Ryan, whom she has not seen since their night together, at a hilltop overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Ryan confesses his feelings towards her, but she tells him that she does not feel the same way. He wishes her well in Italy, and leaves.


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: On the shuttle to the airport, Jennifer passes the same hilltop where they used to spend time together and realizes that she indeed loves Ryan. She immediately races back to her apartment and finds Amy frantically getting dressed to greet her. Steve confidently strolls out of Amy's bedroom and tells Jennifer that Ryan is heading back to Los Angeles on an airplane.


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: While waiting for departure, Ryan hears Jennifer confess her love for him in Latin. After some convincing, and feeling the wrath of a flight attendant, they rekindle their romance where they first met — on an airplane.


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: In April 1999, Miramax purchased the spec script by Andrew Lowery and Andrew Miller, two actors who started writing together. Robert Iscove signed on to direct, reuniting the director and star of "She's All That". Iscove said Prinze "wanted to blow away that good-looking guy image and grow as an actor" by playing a geek. Prinze said, "Most people won't give me a chance to play something different than the good-looking guy. But I love trying new things; I love doing something I haven't done before, and the chance to play a geek was the reason I accepted this role in the first place."


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: Prinze added, "I set out a goal when I was making "She's All That" to do three movies for a specific generation...I did "She's All That", "Down to You", and "Boys and Girls". Now, I've graduated from high school and college for a while."


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: Anna Friel was originally attached as the female lead, but Friel pulled out shortly before filming started due to reported "creative differences" and was replaced by Claire Forlani. Reports differed over whether Friel was fired or quit due to unhappiness with the script.


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: The film features a dance number similar to "She's All That" wherein everyone dances to the song "Stop the Rock" by Apollo 440. Forlani said she was given minimal notices to do it, saying "They literally pull me into this room with 30 dancers who for two days have been learning a routine that I have to learn in half an hour. And it was really complicated, too. I was in the corner … and they ordered like, the Gap kids … and I thought, 'Oh f***, I'm doomed! And Freddie said, 'Oh, I can do it.' And I said, 'Well, that's because you're not meant to get it right.'"


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: Jason Biggs made the film after his breakthrough role in "American Pie". It was the first in a two-picture deal he had with Miramax.


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: Prinze said that Harvey Weinstein had wanted to put a sword fight in "She's All That" and in this film. He commented, "we got a note from Harvey that said they wanted to put a sword fight into ["Boys and Girls"] too, which made no sense because it was a contemporary piece, and Jason Biggs played an architecture student! Those were the crazy notes you'd get from the studio back in the day. I don't understand how Miramax directors didn't all go insane."


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: The film received mainly negative reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a score of 11% based on reviews from 63 critics, with an average rating 3.9 out of 10. The site's critics consensus states, ""Boys and Girls" feels like a cheap rip-off of "When Harry Met Sally." The predictable and stale story fails to engage."


title: Boys and Girls (2000 film)

text: The film opened at No. 6 at the North American box office, making approximately $7 million USD in its opening weekend.


title: Samuel J. Seymour

text: Samuel James Seymour (March 28, 1860 – April 12, 1956) was an American man who was the last surviving person to witness the assassination of U.S. President Lincoln on April 14, 1865.


title: Samuel J. Seymour

text: Seymour was from Talbot County, Maryland. His parents, George and Susan Seymour, had a farm near Easton, Maryland. He later lived in Arlington, Virginia. He worked as a carpenter and contractor, and lived most of his later life in Baltimore. He married Mary Rebecca Twilley. He died April 12, 1956, at the home of his daughter in Arlington, survived by five children, thirteen grandchildren and 35 great-grandchildren. He was buried at Baltimore's Loudon Park Cemetery.


title: Samuel J. Seymour

text: On April 14, 1865, when Seymour was five years old, Sarah Cook, his nurse, along with his godmother Mrs. Goldsborough, who was the wife of his father's employer, took him to see "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., where they sat in the balcony across the theater from the presidential box. He saw Lincoln come into the box, waving and smiling. Later, "All of a sudden a shot rang out... and someone in the President's box screamed. I saw Lincoln slumped forward in his seat." Seymour watched John Wilkes Booth jump from the box to the stage. He remembered that, not understanding what had happened to Lincoln, he was very concerned for Booth, who broke his leg in the jump.


title: Samuel J. Seymour

text: Two months before his death, Seymour appeared on the February 9, 1956, broadcast of the CBS TV panel show "I've Got a Secret". After arriving in New York City he suffered a fall, which left him with a swelling above his right eye. Host Garry Moore, after bringing Seymour on stage, explained that he and the show's producers had urged Seymour to forgo his appearance on the show; that Seymour's doctor had left the choice up to his patient; and that Seymour very much wanted to go on.


title: Samuel J. Seymour

text: During the game, Seymour was first questioned by panellist Bill Cullen, who quickly surmised from Seymour's age that his secret was somehow connected with the American Civil War, then correctly guessed that it had political significance and involved a political figure. Jayne Meadows then guessed that the political figure was Lincoln, and finally that Seymour had witnessed Lincoln's assassination. The rules of the show were that he would win $20 for each of the four panellists who failed to guess his secret. Since the secret was guessed by Jayne Meadows, the second of four panellists, he would normally have won only $20 but the host decided to award the entire $80 jackpot to Seymour for his courage in appearing on the show. Also because Seymour smoked a pipe rather than cigarettes, the show's sponsor, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company gave him a can of Prince Albert pipe tobacco instead of the usual prize of a carton of Winston cigarettes.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: Hunter Zolomon, otherwise known as Zoom and the Reverse-Flash, is a supervillain appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. The second character to assume the "Reverse-Flash" mantle, he serves as the archnemesis of Wally West and an enemy of Barry Allen.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: Created by Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins, Hunter Zolomon made his debut in "The Flash: Secret Files & Origins" #3 in November 2001. He first appeared as Zoom in "The Flash" (vol. 2) #197 in June 2003.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: Hunter Zolomon had a troubled relationship with his parents who rarely spoke to each other or to him. On the day Hunter was to leave for college, his father was revealed to be a serial killer who had murdered six young girls and his mother before being gunned down by the police after refusing to surrender. Following this incident, Hunter became obsessed with understanding the criminal mind and went on to study criminology and psychology at college. He later joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) with his girlfriend Ashley whom he soon married. The two specialized in apprehending low-level costumed criminals until Hunter inadvertently caused the death of Ashley's father; Hunter had mistakenly believed that a criminal they were after, the Clown, was incapable of using a gun. The case also left him with a damaged knee, forcing him to use a cane to walk. Abandoned by Ashley and fired by the F.B.I., Hunter moved to Keystone City and became a profiler in the police's Department of Metahuman Hostilities. Hunter soon befriended the Flash (Wally West) as his insight was critical in solving a number of cases, though Hunter resented being stuck behind a desk.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: Hunter was severely injured during an attack by Gorilla Grodd at Iron Heights Penitentiary, and was left paralysed from the waist down. He begged Wally to use the time-travelling cosmic treadmill in the Flash Museum to prevent the series of tragedies in his life from ever occurring. But Wally refused, not wanting to risk damaging the timestream and thus shattering their friendship. Hunter then broke into the museum and attempted to use the cosmic treadmill himself. The resulting explosion cured Hunter's paralysis and shifted his connection to time; he now had the ability to alter his personal timeframe, granting him super-speed.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: Hunter came to the conclusion that Wally's refusal to help was because of never suffering a personal tragedy unlike Barry Allen. Hunter became the supervillain "Zoom" (aka the second "Reverse-Flash") to bring tragedy to Wally's life, believing that this was the only way to make the Flash a better hero. During an attempt to kill the pregnant Linda Park, Zoom created an electrical shockwave that caused Linda to miscarry their twins instead. Wally then forced Zoom into a temporal anomaly; Hunter was rendered comatose and forced to relive his father-in-law's death repeatedly.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: Zolomon's estranged wife Ashley replaced him as a profiler in the police department and attempted to communicate with him. When Ashley was hospitalized after a car accident, Zoom awakened from his coma out of concern.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: Zoom is freed from imprisonment by Cheetah (Dr. Barbara Minerva), seeking to recruit him into the growing Secret Society of Super Villains. Although the two share a minor attraction and romance, Zoom still considers himself married to Ashley.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: Zoom infiltrates the Rogue war between Captain Cold's Rogues, the Trickster's reformed Rogues, and the Top's brainwashed Rogues. After spiriting Ashley out of danger to Linda's home, Zoom returns to the battlefront to dispatch Captain Cold whom he believes is wasting the Flash's time. As Wally and Kid Flash (Bart Allen) attempt to contain the battle, Zoom threatens to snap Bart's neck in a manner reminiscent of what Barry had done to Eobard Thawne (Professor Zoom aka the original Reverse-Flash). Before Zoom can kill Kid Flash, however, Thawne arrives on a cosmic treadmill with Jay Garrick chained to the front end.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: A battle ensues between the three Flashes and the two Zooms. Zolomon and Thawne capture Wally and jump onto the treadmill. Hunter then forces Wally to repeatedly experience their first fight in which Linda was severely injured, feeling that West should be made to focus on feelings of sorrow and loss to become a better hero. However, Barry arrives on his own cosmic treadmill in search of Thawne. Barry subsequently saves Wally and returns Thawne to the predecessor's proper place in the timeline. The enraged Zoom then begins running around the world, building up speed to collide with and kill Linda. Wally catches up with Zoom and pushes him, causing the villain to fall forward into the sonic boom that he himself used to kill Linda's twins, thus creating a "fissure in time" that restores Linda's pregnancy. Wally grabs Zoom and uses the treadmill to return to the present. Zoom recognises his mistreatment of Wally and briefly apologizes before slipping into the timestream. He is later seen as a ghostly figure apologizing to Ashley.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: Zoom returns during the "Infinite Crisis" event as the Secret Society of Super Villains' chief speedster. He serves as a member of the Society's strike force, scarring Damage with super-speed punches and massacring the Freedom Fighters.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: Zoom later appears at the sacking of Rome; it is unknown whether he travelled to this time period himself, or if he became stranded there after his last encounter with Wally. Zoom is asked by Bart's grandmother to help protect Bart from a tragedy plotted by the villain Inertia. He is also pursued by the Justice League who seek to locate Sinestro after Batman and Green Lantern learn of the Sinestro Corps' existence. Zoom is chased by the Justice Society of America to Atlanta. Damage, seeking revenge on Zoom, takes the villain hostage during a scuffle until being talked down by Liberty Belle. Disappointed that Damage is not "improving", Zoom throws a sharp pipe to kill Damage. Liberty Belle uses super-speed to catch it and toss it back, knocking Zoom unconscious. Zoom later becomes a member of Libra's Secret Society of Super Villains.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: In "", Zoom frees Inertia from the paralysis inflicted by Wally, hoping to make an apprentice out of Inertia by teaching how to "improve" both his own life and the lives of others by inflicting tragedies. Kid Zoom learns this lesson too well and ultimately betrays the Flash's Rogues and Zoom himself, revealing his own desire to make the heroes suffer whereas Zoom wanted them to work through their pain. Inertia then uses his mentor's own timestream manipulation powers against him, unravelling Zoom's timeline and reverting him to the crippled, powerless Zolomon.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: Hunter approaches the resurrected and imprisoned Thawne at Iron Heights Penitentiary, stating that they can help each other to be better.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: In the DC Rebirth relaunch, when Iris West seemingly kills Eobard in the 25th Century, a cloaked figure sends the Renegades back in time to arrest Iris. The hooded man is then revealed to be Zolomon proclaiming that the only way to make the Flashes better heroes is to pit them in a war where they'll experience tragedy. Zolomon muses that he sees Wally as the 'true' Flash, reflecting that Barry's ability to accept death is the crucial difference between Barry and Wally as the Flash (feeling that Wally goes into situations determined to survive) and musing that this difference is how he'll provoke his planned war.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: It is later revealed that Thawne brought Zolomon into the twenty-fifth century as part of Zolomon's prior suggestion that they could help each other be better, the two manipulating the Renegades and agreeing on the need for the Flashes to take a different approach, but they soon parted ways because Thawne felt that, in the end, Zolomon still had faith that the Flashes could be what he imagined them to be whereas Thawne had given up on that idea. After Thawne's 'death', Zolomon finally concedes to Thawne's ideas, returning to his appearance as Zoom and proclaiming that he will provoke the Flashes to war if they will not cooperate with his vision themselves. He subsequently draws Wally to him, claiming that he has lost his powers and regained his sanity, and provokes Wally's memories of lost children, convincing Wally that the Speed Force must be sacrificed to release the other speedsters- including the Flash's children, Impulse and Max Mercury- who are trapped within it, provoking Barry and Wally to war against each other due to their conflicting views on Hunter's 'advice'. The situation escalates when Barry and Wally's conflict breaks the Speed Force, allowing Hunter to draw on the energies of other forces- including what he terms the Strength Force and the Sage Force, enhancing his physical strength and knowledge- but when he tries to use these powers to set history to his own design, he is pursued by the Flashes and lost when he breaks the Speed Force, leaving his location unknown and rendering time travel impossible for the Flashes and any other heroes or villains.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: After he massacred all the Flashes in the multiverse and terrorized Gorilla City, he began searching for the Still Force user. After stealing the Still Force, Hunter reveals to Barry that the combined forces create an entirely new one called the Forever Force, allowing him to see all of time and space. Barry gives chase, along with the Black Flash hot on their trail, intent on purging the other Forces from the Speed Force. Hunter proclaims his goal is to kill the Black Flash, as he says it's his destiny to kill "death itself" after all the tragedies in his life. Barry then shows Hunter a memory fragment in the Forever Force, explaining he investigated Hunter's case on Ashley's father, discovering that Thawne played a part in the murder by giving the Clown a gun before the final confrontation. Distraught by this revelation, Hunter starts to slow his pace. Hunter is reminded that he broke the Force barrier by using Barry and Wally, so they also must find a way to repair the barrier in order to return and solve the mystery of Thawne's involvement. Hunter feels remorse for all the tragedy he inflicted on Wally, his best friend, and against Barry's pleas, resigns to fix the barrier by sacrificing himself as the Flash for atonement, due to him currently wielding the power of all four Forces. He expresses a wish that things could have been different, but then remarks that saving the day is what Flashes do. After telling Barry to tell Wally that he wishes the two could have remained friends, his plan works and the Black Flash is also banished to the Forever Force.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: While most speedsters in the DC Universe draw their powers from the Speed Force, Hunter Zolomon has the ability to alter time relative to himself, manipulating the speed at which time flows around him. With every step he takes, he uses time travel to control his personal timeline; he slows it down to move faster and speeds it up to move slower, effectively allowing Hunter to run at "superhuman speeds". He can also create powerful sonic booms and electrical shockwaves by snapping his fingers, and is able to grant a form of "super-speed" to other beings by giving them the ability to control their relative timelines through himself; a connection that Zoom can shut down at will. Due to his slowed perception of time, Zolomon's strength and physical attributes have been heightened to superhuman levels, allowing him to effortlessly react to danger and be able to withstand punches from speedsters while sustaining no serious injuries. The temporal nature of Zoom's powers renders him unaffected by the usual problems and hindrances encountered by other speedsters, such as friction and perception when moving at heightened velocities.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: Hunter possesses a keen mind, as he was once an investigator specialising in the study of criminology and psychology. Zolomon is also an expert in many forms of hand-to-hand combat, including the martial arts form Taekwondo, and an avid cross country runner and jogger even prior to gaining metahuman powers.


title: Hunter Zolomon

text: Hunter Zolomon / Zoom appears in series set in the Arrowverse, portrayed by Teddy Sears while Tony Todd provides the character's disguised voice. Additionally, Ryan Handley portrays Zoom's initial portrayal, and Octavian Kaul portrays Zolomon as a child in flashbacks. This version is a speedster from Earth-2 who produces blue lightning while running and wears an all-black leather bodysuit with clawed gloves and a demonic mask resembling a face restraint. As a child, Zolomon was forced to watch his father murder his mother, which resulted in him becoming a serial killer as an adult before being captured and sent to a mental asylum. When Harry Wells's particle accelerator exploded as Zolomon was being electrocuted, the dark matter released gave him super-speed. Adopting the supervillain moniker Zoom, he used his powers to subjugate Earth-2 and further augmented his connection to the Speed Force by creating various "Velocity" serums. While he became fast enough to travel through time and cross parallel universes, Zolomon was slowly dying due to overuse of the serum, forcing him to siphon other speedsters' energy to survive. After capturing the Flash of Earth-3, Jay Garrick, Zolomon decided to publicly act as the Flash of Earth-2 to give its people a false sense of hope.


title: Yahshua

text: Yahshua is a proposed transliteration of , the original Hebrew name of Jesus. The pronunciation "Yahshua" is philologically impossible in the original Hebrew and has no support in archeological findings, such as the Dead Sea scrolls or inscriptions, nor in rabbinical texts as a form of Joshua. Scholarship generally considers the original form of Jesus to be Yeshua, a Hebrew Bible form of Joshua.


title: Yahshua

text: Usage and/or support of the name "Yahshua" is largely restricted to religious groups that are a part of (or otherwise associated with) the Sacred Name and Hebrew Roots movements which, among other things, advocate for the preservation of Hebrew sacred names in translations of the Bible.


title: Yahshua

text: The English "Jesus" is a transliteration of the Greek , or . In translations of the Hebrew Bible into Ancient Greek, was used to represent the Hebrew/Aramaic name Yeshua, a derivation of the earlier Hebrew , or Joshua. Both names mean 'Yah saves'. As a result, it is a commonly accepted fact within academia that Jesus' native Hebrew/Aramaic name was "Yeshua".


title: Yahshua

text: The pronunciation of the older, longer name as "Yehoshua" is attested to since ancient times. In the 19th century, the Second Great Awakening lead to a religious revival of Protestantism in America which spawned several divergent movements. Among these newfound movements was Adventism, which, among other things, mandated a return to the recognition of the Jewish Sabbath as the Christian Sabbath. Part of a larger attitude to reorient Christianity to what was considered its Jewish roots, Adventism eventually gave rise to groups such as the Assemblies of Yahweh, which taught that the Tetragrammaton should be directly translated as "Yahweh" as opposed to the traditional translation of simply "". As a part of this, attempts were made to more directly correlate Jesus to the Israelite god.


title: Yahshua

text: In Hebrew (which normally writes only consonants), "Yehoshua" starts with the same two letters as "Yahweh". The new pronunciation was produced by incorporating the pronunciation of the first syllable of "Yahweh" into "Yehoshua", producing "Yah-shua".


title: Yahshua

text: The oldest currently known New Testament manuscripts, particularly those containing more than a handful of verses (as some early papyrus fragments do), were copied a few centuries later than the original individual New Testament books would have been written. The Assemblies of Yahweh believe that during this time these manuscripts, which are extant in Greek, most likely were translated. However, the general consensus of Bible scholars is that the New Testament was originally written only in Koine Greek (save for a number oc words); the claim of the Assemblies of Yahweh therefore received no traction in academia.


title: Yahshua

text: As a result, the names Yahweh and Yahshua should have appeared in the original Hebrew or Aramaic texts of the New Testament, according to the Assemblies of Yahweh; but no such texts existed, according to Bible scholars. There is scriptural evidence to suggest that the apostles were using these Hebrew names, such as in Acts 18:12-16. Due to the decision by Jews to no longer pronounce the name, the message of Yahshua – that Yahweh is salvation – would have angered many, argue the Assemblies of Yahweh for their own (fringe) belief. George Howard of the University of Georgia considers the possibility that the Tetragrammaton was retained in the first documents of the Greek translation just as it had been retained in the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures.


title: Yahshua

text: Although the original manuscripts could be called inspired, Meyer writes that "there is no such thing as an inspired translation". Mistakes are sometimes made in translation and these are passed down to each subsequent translation. An example of a perceived mistake by a translator translating the Hebrew original manuscripts is found in Revelation 19:16. The scripture here says that the Messiah has a name written on his thigh. This lacks sense, but when considering the original Hebrew language the root problem becomes clear. As explained by the Assemblies of Yahweh:


title: Yahshua

text: Such arguments have been roundly rejected by academia, wherein the idea that the texts of the New Testament were translations from Hebrew or Aramaic got no traction.


title: Yahshua

text: The pronunciation of "Yahshua" is impossible on a number of levels. It violates basic Hebrew phonology, as Hebrew linguistics do not allow the (), as in (), to be silent. The pronunciation "Yahshua" likewise cannot be found with that spelling anywhere in history, in writings in Hebrew or otherwise, prior to the 1900s.


title: Andrew Goldberg (writer)

text: Goldberg co-created the Netflix adult animated series "Big Mouth" with his childhood best friend Nick Kroll, and Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett, and serves as a writer and executive producer. Prior to that, he wrote for "Family Guy". He is also the author of "", a book published by HarperCollins focusing on Brian Griffin's beliefs.


title: Andrew Goldberg (writer)

text: Goldberg was born and raised in White Plains, New York and is of Jewish descent. He earned his BA at Columbia University in 2000 and his MFA at the UCLA School of Film & Television in 2002.


title: Public holidays in China

text: There are currently seven official public holidays in mainland China. Each year's holidays are announced about three weeks before the start of the year by the General Office of the State Council. A notable feature of mainland Chinese holidays is that weekends are usually swapped with the weekdays next to the actual holiday to create a longer holiday period.


title: Public holidays in China

text: Festivals in China have been around since the Qin Dynasty around 221-206 BC. During the more prosperous Tang Dynasty from AD 618–907, festivals involved less sacrifice and mystery to more entertainment. Culminating to the modern era Between the 1920s until around the 1970s, the Chinese began observing two sets of holidays, which were the traditional and what became "official", celebrating the accomplishments of the communist regime. There was then a major reform in 2008, abolishing the Labour Day Golden Week and adding three traditional Chinese holidays (Qingming Festival, Duanwu Festival, and Mid-Autumn Festival). From at least 2000 until this reform, the Spring Festival public holiday began on New Year's Day itself. From 2008 to 2013 it was shifted back by one day to begin on Chinese New Year's Eve. In 2014, New Year's Eve became a working day again, which provoked hostile discussion by netizens and academics. However, since 2015, Chinese New Year's Eve is usually swapped with nearby weekends so that people need not work on Chinese New Year's Eve.


title: Public holidays in China

text: In all these holidays, if the holiday lands on a weekend, the days will be reimbursed after the weekend.


title: Public holidays in China

text: The Chinese New Year and National Day holidays are three days long. The week-long holidays on May (Labor) Day and National Day began in 2000, as a measure to increase and encourage holiday spending. The resulting seven-day or eight-day (if Mid-Autumn Festival is near National Day) holidays are called "Golden Weeks" (), and have become peak seasons for travel and tourism. In 2008, the Labor Day holiday was shortened to three days to reduce travel rushes to just twice a year, and instead, three traditional Chinese holidays were added.


title: Public holidays in China

text: Generally, if there is a three-day or four-day (if Mid-Autumn Festival is near National Day) holiday, the government will declare it to be a seven-day or eight-day holiday. However, citizens are required to work during a nearby weekend. Businesses and schools would then treat the affected Saturdays and Sundays as the weekdays that the weekend has been swapped with. Schedules are released late in the year prior and might change during the year.


title: Public holidays in China

text: Shift the Saturdays and Sundays nearby to make a 7-day holiday. People may need to work for 6 or 7 continuous days before or after the holiday.


title: Public holidays in China

text: Shift the Saturdays and Sundays nearby to make a 7-day holiday. The holiday is from 1 to 7 October. People may need to work for 6 or 7 continuous days before or after the holiday.


title: Public holidays in China

text: In addition to these holidays, applicable to the whole population, there are four official public holidays applicable to specific sections of the population:


title: Public holidays in China

text: The closeness of Labor Day and Youth Day resulted in an unexpectedly long break for schools in 2008 - the Youth Day half-holiday entitlement had been largely forgotten because it has been subsumed into the Golden Week.


title: Public holidays in China

text: There are public holidays celebrated by certain ethnic minorities in certain regions, which are decided by local governments. The following are holidays at the provincial level.


title: Public holidays in China

text: The following are traditional holidays at the prefectural level, and there are more at lower level divisions, i.e. county-level.


title: Public holidays in China

text: In addition, the following Autonomous Prefectures celebrates their founding date ( or ). Generally government takes 1 day off to all people working in such prefectures.


title: Public holidays in China

text: Some Chinese young adults have begun to celebrate 11 November as Singles Day () because of the many ones (1s) and many singles in the date.


title: Auto Train

text: Auto Train is an scheduled daily train service for passengers and their automobiles operated by Amtrak between Lorton, Virginia (near Washington, D.C.), and Sanford, Florida (near Orlando). "Auto Train" is the only motorail service in the United States.


title: Auto Train

text: Passengers ride in coach seats or private sleeping car rooms while their vehicles are carried in enclosed automobile-carrying freight cars called autoracks. The train can carry up to 320 vehicles. The train also includes lounge cars and dining cars. "Auto Train" allows its passengers to avoid driving Interstate 95 in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida while bringing their own vehicles with them. It has the highest revenue of any Amtrak long-distance train.


title: Auto Train

text: The service operates as train number 52 northbound and number 53 southbound. The train operates non-stop between its Virginia and Florida terminals, except for a brief stop in Florence, South Carolina, for servicing and a crew change of the engineer and conductors.


title: Auto Train

text: Amtrak's "Auto Train" is the successor to an earlier, similarly named service operated by the privately-owned Auto-Train Corporation in the 1970s.


title: Auto Train

text: The original "Auto-Train" operated on Seaboard Coast Line Railroad and Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac tracks. It was operated by Auto-Train Corporation, a privately owned railroad carrier founded by Eugene K. Garfield. Garfield had worked at the U.S. Department of Transportation, which had funded a study of the practicality of an automobile-train service. Garfield resigned and used the study as the blueprint for his enterprise. The company provided a service unique in the country: scheduled rail transportation for passengers and their automobiles between Lorton, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and Sanford, Florida, near Orlando, Florida.


title: Auto Train

text: The Auto-Train Corporation used its own rolling stock, painted in red, white, and purple. The typical train was equipped with two or three General Electric U36B diesel-electric locomotives; double-deck auto carriers; streamlined passenger cars, including coaches, dining cars, and sleeping cars; and full-dome cars; and a caboose, then an unusual sight on most passenger trains. The engines were freight types, purchased at much lower cost than passenger types. But they lacked steam generators, so heat to the passenger cars was supplied by steam-generator cars. Passengers rode in wide coach seats or private first-class sleeping compartments, and meals were served in dining cars. Their vehicles were carried in enclosed autoracks. The company's first autoracks were acquired used, and started life in the 1950s as an innovation of the Canadian National (CN) Railroad. The CN cars were huge by the standards of the time: each 75-footer (23.86 m) could carry eight vehicles, which were loaded through end-doors.


title: Auto Train

text: The "Auto-Train" began running on December 6, 1971. It was immediately popular with the traveling public and at first enjoyed financial success as well. In FY1974 the company turned a profit of $1.6 million on revenues of $20 million. In May 1974, service began over a second route between Florida and Louisville, Kentucky, and the company was mulling additional service between Chicago and Denver. The Louisville extension proved to be the company's undoing. The decaying Louisville and Nashville Railroad track between Louisville and Florida (which also hampered Amtrak's "Floridian") hindered operations, and a pair of derailments stretched the company's finances to the breaking point. Service ceased in April 1981.


title: Auto Train

text: After 22 months, the service was revived by Amtrak, which operates most intercity passenger trains in the United States. Amtrak acquired the terminals in Lorton and Sanford and some of the Auto-Train equipment. On October 30, 1983, it introduced a triweekly version of the service under the restyled name ""Auto Train"". Daily service was introduced a year later.


title: Auto Train

text: Amtrak used Auto-Train's bi-level and tri-level autoracks. For passenger equipment, it initially used a mixture of former Auto-Train railcars and mid-century long-distance railcars from Amtrak's general fleet, all rebuilt to Amtrak's "Heritage Fleet" standards. In the mid-1990s, Amtrak replaced all these passenger railcars, which were of the conventional single-level type, with its newer, bi-level Superliner I and II equipment. In 2006, the aging bi-level, tri-level, and "van" autoracks were phased out and replaced with 80 new autoracks. Unlike the old racks, the new racks have uniform heights and are most similar to the "vans" of the previous fleet.


title: Auto Train

text: Amtrak operates two Auto Trains simultaneously each day, Train No. 53 from Lorton and Train No. 52 from Sanford, departing at 5 p.m. for a scheduled arrival the following day at 10 a.m. In practice, however, the trains usually run late. In May 2021, for example, only 31 percent of Auto Trains arrived on time, mostly because of interference by freight trains that have preference over much of the route.


title: Auto Train

text: The "Auto Train" was the last Amtrak service to permit smoking on board. Amtrak discontinued the practice on June 1, 2013.


title: Auto Train

text: "Auto Train" operates on the same route it and its predecessor have always used; most of the route is owned by CSX Transportation while 16 miles are owned by SunRail.


title: Auto Train

text: The trains are known by their route numbers internally by Amtrak. When communicating on the CSX road channels, they are known by their CSX designations: P053xx and P052xx, where xx is the 2-digit date on which the train departed its origin station. For example, a southbound train that departed on the 23rd of the month would be known as CSX P05323 on the road channels. This allows for unique identification when two trains on the same route are operating simultaneously.


title: Auto Train

text: Ridership hit a peak of 274,445 in Amtrak's fiscal year 2014. Ridership declined through 2019, then dropped some 30% to 163,556 in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. It recovered somewhat in 2021, to 199,414.


title: Auto Train

text: The "Auto Train" has the highest revenue of any Amtrak long-distance train. The train had total revenue of US$75,169,554 in FY2016, down 7.9% from FY2015.


title: Auto Train

text: The train operates every day. At 12:30 pm, the station gates are opened to allow the vehicles into the vehicle staging area. Here, each vehicle is assigned a unique number, which is affixed to the driver's door magnetically. The vehicle is typically videoed to document existing dents and other damage, in case a damage claim is later filed. The passengers leave their vehicles here and take their carry-on bags with them into the station to await boarding. The vehicles are then staged near the autorack ramps by size and length for optimal loading order and are then loaded onto the autoracks. Motorcycle owners help tie their bikes down to a motorcycle carrier that is then loaded into the autorack. Passengers can not access their vehicles during the trip.


title: Auto Train

text: The last vehicles and passengers are accepted up until 3 p.m., after which the autoracks are closed and coupled together, the passenger cars are coupled together in the case of Sanford departures, and the autoracks are coupled to the rear of the consist. At 5 p.m., the train departs the station.


title: Auto Train

text: About 1 a.m., the train makes its sole scheduled stop, at the Florence, South Carolina, station, where a new engineer and conductors take over and the train takes on fuel and water. No passengers embark or disembark here.


title: Auto Train

text: The schedule calls for the trains to arrive in Lorton and Sanford about 10 a.m. the next day. When the trains arrive on time, they have covered the 855-mile (1,376 km) journey in about 17 hours, at an average speed of about 50 miles per hour (80 km/h).


title: Auto Train

text: Passengers cannot immediately leave the train, as the autoracks are first decoupled from the consist, and in the case of the Sanford station, the passenger cars are split into two sections to fit on Sanford's shorter platforms. At this point, the passengers are then allowed to disembark and move to the auto claim area. Cleaning crews move into the train after passengers leave, and the train is re-supplied with food and water. The passenger cars' seat backs are flipped to allow everyone in coach to ride facing forward.


title: Auto Train

text: The autoracks are further split into three to six sections and each section is aligned with a loading ramp (see picture). The doors between each are opened, and connecting ramps are lowered to allow vehicles to move between cars. At this point vehicles begin to roll off the autoracks and to the claim area, where they are identified and announced by the vehicle number that was attached to the vehicle at the origin station. Vehicles are not unloaded in the same order they were loaded. It normally takes one hour to unload all vehicles from a full train. The first 30 vehicles off belong to passengers who have paid $60 or $65, depending on peak or off-peak travel times, a service Amtrak has offered by the name Priority Vehicle Offloading since April 2013.


title: Auto Train

text: Lorton, Virginia, is about a half-hour drive south of Washington, D.C., near Interstate 95 in Northern Virginia. Amtrak's new Lorton terminal opened in early 2000 as a replacement for the original station built during the 1970s, and features a large, modern waiting area with high glass walls. The station was designed by architect Hanny Hassan. The suspended sculpture in the lobby was designed by Patrick Sheridan. The platform is long.


title: Auto Train

text: Lorton was selected as site of the northern terminal because the height autoracks were too tall to pass through the First Street Tunnel into Washington, D.C.


title: Auto Train

text: Sanford, Florida, is the southern terminus and is about a half-hour drive north of Orlando. The original facility was older and smaller than the terminal at Lorton. At Sanford, the "Auto Train" loads passengers on two tracks, as no one track is long enough to accommodate all the passenger railcars. Sanford's operation is unique in that a railroad crossing runs through the middle of the rail yard. This complicates some switching procedures and also requires a three-man yard conductor crew – conductor, assistant conductor, and a utility conductor – while operations at Lorton requires only a conductor and assistant conductor. Both yards operate with one engineer. Sanford serves as the main mechanical and maintenance location for "Auto Train", with diesel and car shops to service the fleet. The city of Sanford provides a shuttle bus to the historic district departing every 20 minutes between noon and 2:00 pm free of charge on all days except Sundays and certain major holidays.


title: Auto Train

text: The "Auto Train" uses Amtrak’s bi-level Superliner equipment, which is used for trains in the western United States and cannot pass through Baltimore Penn Station or the North River Tunnels for access to New York Penn Station. A typical consist includes two GE Genesis locomotives in the front, a transition sleeper car, three sleeping cars, a sightseer lounge car, a full-service dining car, five sleepers, a cafe dining car, four coaches, and up to 33 autoracks.


title: Auto Train

text: Superliner sleeping cars have deluxe bedrooms on the upper level, roomettes on the upper and lower levels, one "family bedroom", and one "accessible bedroom". Coach cars have reclining seats on both levels. The "Sightseer Lounge" car has wrap-around windows on the upper level and an informal café on the lower. One dining and lounge car is reserved for the use of sleeping car customers, while another also serves coach passengers.


title: Auto Train

text: With a total length of roughly , the "Auto Train" is often said to be the longest passenger train in the world.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Vijay Dhondopant Tendulkar (6 January 1928 – 19 May 2008) was a leading Indian playwright, movie and television writer, literary essayist, political journalist, and social commentator primarily in Marāthi. His Marathi plays established him as a writer of plays with contemporary, unconventional themes. He is best known for his plays "Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe" (1967), "Ghāshirām Kotwāl" (1972), and "Sakhārām Binder" (1972). Many of Tendulkar's plays derived inspiration from real-life incidents or social upheavals, which provide clear light on harsh realities. He has provided guidance to students studying "play writing" in US universities. Tendulkar was a dramatist and theatre personality in Mahārāshtra for over five decades.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Vijay Dhondopant Tendulkar was born in a Gaud Saraswat Brahmin family on 6 January 1928 in Girgaon, Mumbai, Maharashtra, where his father held a clerical job and ran a small publishing business. The literary environment at home prompted young Vijay to take up writing. He wrote his first story at age six.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: He grew up watching western plays and felt inspired to write plays himself. At age eleven, he wrote, directed, and acted in his first play.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: At age 14, he participated in the 1942 Indian freedom movement, leaving his studies. The latter alienated him from his family and friends. Writing then became his outlet, though most of his early writings were of a personal nature, and not intended for publication. During this period, he participated in the activities of Nabajiban Sanghatana, a splinter communist group. He said that he liked sense of sacrifice and discipline of the communists.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Tendulkar began his career writing for newspapers. He had already written a play, "Āmcyāvar Koṇ Preṃ Karṇār?" ( Who is going to love me?), and he wrote the play, "Gṛhastha" (गृहस्थ; The Householder), in his early 20s. The latter did not receive much recognition from the audience, and he vowed never to write again.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Breaking the vow, in 1956 he wrote "Śrīmant" Rich), which established him as a good writer. "Śrīmant" jolted the conservative audience of the times with its radical storyline, wherein an unmarried young woman decides to keep her unborn child while her rich father tries to "buy" her a husband in an attempt to save his social prestige.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Tendulkar's early struggle for survival and living for some time in tenements (""cāḷ"/chawls") in Mumbai provided him first-hand experience about the life of urban lower middle class. He thus brought new authenticity to their depiction in Marathi theatre. Tendulkar's writings rapidly changed the storyline of modern Marathi theatre in the 1950s and the 60s, with experimental presentations by theatre groups like Rangayan. Actors in these theatre groups like Shriram Lagoo, Mohan Agashe, and Sulabha Deshpande brought new authenticity and power to Tendulkar's stories while introducing new sensibilities in Marathi theatre.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Tendulkar wrote the play "Gidhāḍe" (गिधाडे; The Vultures) in 1961, but it was not produced until 1970. The play was set in a morally collapsed family structure and explored the theme of violence. In his following creations, Tendulkar explored violence in its various forms: domestic, sexual, communal, and political. Thus, "Gidhāḍe" proved to be a turning point in Tendulkar's writings with regard to establishment of his own unique writing style.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Based on a 1956 short story, "Die Panne" ("Traps") by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Tendulkar wrote the play, "Śāntatā! Court Cālū Āhe" (शांतता! कोर्ट चालू आहे; "Silence! The Court is in Session"). It was presented on the stage for the first time in 1967 and proved as one of his finest works. Satyadev Dubey presented it in movie form in 1971 with Tendulkar's collaboration as the screenplay writer.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: In his 1972 play, "Sakhārām Binder" (Sakhārām, the Binder), Tendulkar dealt with the topic of domination of the male gender over the female. The main character, Sakhārām, is a man devoid of ethics and morality, and professes not to believe in "outdated" social codes and conventional marriage. He accordingly uses the society for his own pleasure. He regularly gives "shelter" to abandoned wives and uses them for his sexual gratification while remaining oblivious to the emotional and moral implications of his exploits. He justifies all his acts through claims of modern, unconventional thinking, and comes up with hollow arguments meant in fact to enslave women. Paradoxically, some of the women which Sakhārām had enslaved buy into his arguments and simultaneously badly want freedom from their enslavement.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: In 1972, Tendulkar wrote another, even much more acclaimed play, "Ghāshirām Kotwāl" ("Officer Ghāshirām"), which dealt with political violence. The play is a political satire created as a musical drama set in 18th century Pune. It combined traditional Marathi folk music and drama with contemporary theatre techniques, creating a new paradigm for Marathi theatre. The play demonstrates Tendulkar's deep study of group psychology, and it brought him a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship (1974–75) for a project titled, "An Enquiry into the Pattern of Growing Violence in Society and Its Relevance to Contemporary Theatre". With over 6,000 performances thus far in its original and translated versions, "Ghāshirām Kotwāl" remains one of the longest-running plays in the history of Indian theatre.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Tendulkar wrote screenplays for the movies "Nishānt" (1974), "Ākrosh" (The Cry) (1980), and "Ardh Satya" (The Half-Truth) (1984) which established him as an important "Chronicler of Violence" of the present. He has written eleven movies in Hindi and eight movies in Marathi. The latter include "Sāmanā" ("Confrontation") (1975), "Simhāasan" ("Throne") (1979), and "Umbartha" ("The Threshold") (1981). The last one is a groundbreaking feature film on women's activism in India. It was directed by Jabbar Patel and stars Smitā Pātil and Girish Karnād.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: In 1991, Tendulkar wrote a metaphorical play, "Safar", and in 2001 he wrote the play, "The Masseur". He next wrote two novels — "Kādambari: Ek" and "Kādambari: Don" — about sexual fantasies of an ageing man. In 2004, he wrote a single-act play, "His Fifth Woman" — his first play in the English language — as a sequel to his earlier exploration of the plight of women in "Sakhārām Binder". This play was first performed at the Vijay Tendulkar Festival in New York in October 2004.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: In the 1990s, Tendulkar wrote an acclaimed TV series, "SwayamSiddha", in which his daughter Priyā Tendulkar, noted Television actress of 'Rajani' fame, performed in the lead role. His last screenplay was for "Eashwar Mime Co." (2005), an adaptation of Dibyendu Palit's story, "Mukhabhinoy", and directed by theatre director, Shyamanand Jalan and with Ashish Vidyarthi and Pawan Malhotra as leads.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Tendulkar died in Pune on 19 May 2008, battling the effects of the rare autoimmune disease myasthenia gravis.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Tendulkar's son Raja and wife Nirmala had died in 2001; his daughter Priya Tendulkar died the next year (2002) of a heart attack following a long battle with breast cancer.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Following the post-Godhra communal carnage in Gujarat in 2002, Tendulkar reacted by saying that "If I had a pistol, I would shoot [Gujarat Chief Minister] Narendra Modi". This reaction of Tendulkar had evoked mixed reactions, local Modi supporters burning his effigies while others lauding his remark.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Later, when he was asked if it was not strange that he, who was known as a strong voice against death penalty, had a death wish for Modi, Tendulkar had said that "it was spontaneous anger, which I never see as a solution for anything. Anger doesn't solve problems."


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: In his writing career spanning more than five decades, Tendulkar has written 27 full-length plays and 25 one-act plays. Several of his plays have proven to be Marathi theatre classics. His plays have been translated and performed in many Indian languages.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: By providing insight into major social events and political upheavals during his adult life, Tendulkar became one of the strongest radical political voices in Maharashtra in recent times. While contemporary writers were cautiously exploring the limits of social realism, he jumped into the cauldron of political radicalism and courageously exposed political hegemony of the powerful and the hypocrisies in the Indian social mindset. His powerful expression of human angst has resulted in his simultaneously receiving wide public acclaim and high censure from the orthodox and the political bigwigs.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Many of Tendulkar's plays derived inspiration from real-life incidents or social upheavals. Thus, the rise of Shiv Sena in Maharashtra in the 1970s was reflected in Tendulkar's "Ghāshirām Kotwāl". The true story of a journalist who purchased of a woman from the rural sex industry to reveal police and political involvement in this trade, only to abandon the woman once he had no further need for her, is detailed in Tendulkar's "Kamalā". The play was later made into a film Kamla (film).


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: The real-life story of an actress whose acting career got ruined after her same-sex affair became public knowledge inspired Tendulkar to write "Mitrāchi Goshta".


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Besides the foregoing, Tendulkar's oeuvre includes a biography; two novels; five anthologies of short stories; 16 plays for children, including "Bāle Miltāt" (1960) and "Pātlāchyā Poriche Lagin" (1965); and five volumes of literary essays and social criticism, including "Ratrani" (1971), "Kowali Unhe" (1971), and "Phuge Sobānche" (1974). All in all, Tendulkar's writings have contributed to a significant transformation of the modern literary landscape in Marathi and other Indian languages.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: In 2005, a documentary titled "Tendulkar Āni Himsā: Kāl Āni Āj" ("Tendulkar and Violence: Then and Now") with English subtitles (produced by California Arts Association - CalAA - directed by Atul Pethe) was released. In 2007, a short film about Tendulkar, "Ankahin", (director Santosh Ayachit) was released.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: Tendulkar won Maharashtra State government awards in 1969 and 1972; and Mahārāshtra Gaurav Puraskār in 1999. He was honoured with the Sangeet Nātak Akademi Award in 1970, and again in 1998 with the Academy's highest award for "lifetime contribution", the Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship ("Ratna Sadasya"). In 1984, he received the Padma Bhushan award from the Government of India for his literary accomplishments.


title: Vijay Tendulkar

text: In 1977, Tendulkar won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay for his screenplay of "Shyām Benegal"'s movie, "Manthan" (1976). He has written screenplays for many significant art movies, such as "Nishānt", "Ākrosh", "Ardh Satya" and "Aghaat".


title: Inverse Laplace transform

text: In mathematics, the inverse Laplace transform of a function "F"("s") is the piecewise-continuous and exponentially-restricted real function "f"("t") which has the property:


title: Inverse Laplace transform

text: It can be proven that, if a function "F"("s") has the inverse Laplace transform "f"("t"), then "f"("t") is uniquely determined (considering functions which differ from each other only on a point set having Lebesgue measure zero as the same). This result was first proven by Mathias Lerch in 1903 and is known as Lerch's theorem.


title: Inverse Laplace transform

text: The Laplace transform and the inverse Laplace transform together have a number of properties that make them useful for analysing linear dynamical systems.


title: Inverse Laplace transform

text: An integral formula for the inverse Laplace transform, called the "Mellin's inverse formula", the "Bromwich integral", or the "Fourier–Mellin integral", is given by the line integral:


title: Inverse Laplace transform

text: where the integration is done along the vertical line Re("s") = "γ" in the complex plane such that "γ" is greater than the real part of all singularities of "F"("s") and "F"("s") is bounded on the line, for example if the contour path is in the region of convergence. If all singularities are in the left half-plane, or "F"("s") is an entire function , then "γ" can be set to zero and the above inverse integral formula becomes identical to the inverse Fourier transform.


title: Inverse Laplace transform

text: Post's inversion formula for Laplace transforms, named after Emil Post, is a simple-looking but usually impractical formula for evaluating an inverse Laplace transform.


title: Inverse Laplace transform

text: The statement of the formula is as follows: Let "f"("t") be a continuous function on the interval [0, ∞) of exponential order, i.e.


title: Inverse Laplace transform

text: for some real number "b". Then for all "s" > "b", the Laplace transform for "f"("t") exists and is infinitely differentiable with respect to "s". Furthermore, if "F"("s") is the Laplace transform of "f"("t"), then the inverse Laplace transform of "F"("s") is given by


title: Inverse Laplace transform

text: As can be seen from the formula, the need to evaluate derivatives of arbitrarily high orders renders this formula impractical for most purposes.


title: Inverse Laplace transform

text: With the advent of powerful personal computers, the main efforts to use this formula have come from dealing with approximations or asymptotic analysis of the Inverse Laplace transform, using the Grunwald–Letnikov differintegral to evaluate the derivatives.


title: Inverse Laplace transform

text: Post's inversion has attracted interest due to the improvement in computational science and the fact that it is not necessary to know where the poles of "F"("s") lie, which make it possible to calculate the asymptotic behaviour for big "x" using inverse Mellin transforms for several arithmetical functions related to the Riemann hypothesis.


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: Jonathan Dimbleby (born 31 July 1944) is a British presenter of current affairs and political radio and television programmes, author and historian. He is the son of Richard Dimbleby and younger brother of television presenter David Dimbleby.


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: Dimbleby was educated at Charterhouse, a boys' independent school in Surrey. Later, he studied farm management at the Royal Agricultural College and graduated in 1965. He then studied philosophy at University College, London, where he was editor of the student newspaper "Pi", and graduated in 1970. He was later elected an Honorary Fellow but resigned in 2015 in protest at the dismissal of Professor Emeritus Tim Hunt.


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: In July 2007 he received an honorary degree from the University of Exeter. He is an Honorary Fellow of Bath Spa University (2006) and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the West of England (2018).


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: Dimbleby began his career at the BBC in Bristol in 1969. In 1970 he joined "The World at One" as a reporter, where he also presented "The World This Weekend". In 1972 he joined ITV's flagship current affairs programme "This Week" and over the following six years reported on crises in many parts of the world. His coverage of the 1973 Ethiopian famine, "The Unknown Famine," was followed by TV and radio appeals which raised a record sum nationally and internationally. His report, for which he won the SFTA Richard Dimbleby Award, was used by the incoming regime to justify the overthrow of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: In 1978 he wrote and presented the ITV series "Jonathan Dimbleby in South America". In 1979 he joined Yorkshire Television, where he wrote and presented three ITV network series: 'Jonathan Dimbleby In Search of the American Dream' (1976), "The Bomb" (1979), "The Eagle and The Bear" (1980) and "The Cold War Game" (1981). He also presented the ITV documentary series "First Tuesday". In 1985 he joined TV-am as presenter of "Jonathan Dimbleby on Sunday". In 1986 he returned to ITV as presenter of "This Week".


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: In 1988 he joined the BBC to present the new flagship political programme "On the Record" (1988–93). He wrote, presented and co-produced two documentary series: "The Last Governor" (BBC1 1997) about the final five years of British rule in Hong Kong, and "" (ITV 1994), in which (then) Prince Charles spoke about his first marriage and his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, now his wife and Queen Consort.


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: From 1994 to 2006 he presented ITV's political programme, "Jonathan Dimbleby". He anchored ITV's general election coverage in 1997, 2001 and 2005. He wrote and presented "Russia with Jonathan Dimbleby" (BBC2 2008), "An African Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby" (2010), and "A South American Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby" (2011). In 2013 he wrote and presented "Churchill's Desert War" (BBC2) based on his book, "Destiny in The Desert". In 2015 he wrote and presented the two-part series "The BBC At War" (BBC 2).


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: From 1987 to June 2019 he presented "Any Questions?" on BBC Radio 4. He presented "Any Answers?" from 1989 to 2012. From 2016 to 2019, he was the main presenter of the BBC World Service monthly series "World Questions".


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: In April 2020, Dimbleby wrote and presented the ITV documentary "Return to Belsen with Jonathan Dimbleby" about the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: In 2022 following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Dimbleby wrote and presented the documentary "Charles, the Monarch and the Man" which aired on ITV on 13 September 2022.


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: Dimbleby wanted to be a farmer when he left school and worked on the Royal Farm, Windsor, trained as a professional showjumper and studied at the Royal Agricultural College (now University) at Cirencester. From 1993 until 2004 he ran an organic farm near Bath, Somerset.


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: He is a past president of Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), past president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), past president of the Soil Association and a past president of the RSPB. He is chair of the Richard Dimbleby Cancer Fund, the charity established in 1966 in memory of his father. He was chairman of the Index on Censorship's Board of Trustees from 2008 until 2013, when he was succeeded by David Aaronovitch. He is patron of several other charities.


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: Dimbleby is the son of the Second World War war correspondent Richard Dimbleby, who was later to become presenter of the BBC TV current affairs programme "Panorama". His elder brother David Dimbleby is also a current-affairs commentator and presenter of BBC programmes. Jonathan wrote a biography of his father in 1975.


title: Jonathan Dimbleby

text: Dimbleby married author, journalist, and broadcaster Bel Mooney in 1968. They have two children: Kitty, a journalist; and Daniel, a television producer. In May 2003, Dimbleby began a relationship with the soprano Susan Chilcott, with whom he lived until her death from breast cancer in September 2003. Later that year Dimbleby and Mooney separated and in 2006 they were divorced. In 2007 Dimbleby married Jessica Ray. They have two daughters, Daisy and Gwendolen, and live in Bristol.


title: UFC on ESPN: Luque vs. Muhammad 2

text: UFC on ESPN: Luque vs. Muhammad 2 (also known as UFC on ESPN 34 and UFC Vegas 51) was a mixed martial arts event produced by the Ultimate Fighting Championship that took place on April 16, 2022, at the UFC Apex facility in Enterprise, Nevada, part of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Area, United States.


title: UFC on ESPN: Luque vs. Muhammad 2

text: A welterweight rematch between Vicente Luque and Belal Muhammad headlined the event. The pair previously met at UFC 205, where Luque won the bout via first-round knockout.


title: UFC on ESPN: Luque vs. Muhammad 2

text: A lightweight bout between Drakkar Klose and Nikolas Motta was briefly link to the event. However, Motta was removed from the event for undisclosed reasons and replaced by Brandon Jenkins.


title: UFC on ESPN: Luque vs. Muhammad 2

text: A welterweight bout between Miguel Baeza and Dhiego Lima was scheduled for the event. However, Lima announced his retirement from competition in early February and was replaced by André Fialho.


title: UFC on ESPN: Luque vs. Muhammad 2

text: A featherweight bout between Melsik Baghdasaryan and T.J. Laramie was originally booked for UFC 268, but Laramie had an MRSA infection and it was postponed. They were then expected to meet at this event. In turn, Baghdasaryan pulled out due to unknown reasons and Laramie was matched up against Pat Sabatini.


title: UFC on ESPN: Luque vs. Muhammad 2

text: A lightweight bout between Victor Martinez and Jordan Leavitt was scheduled for the event. However, Martinez withdrew from the event due to unknown reasons and was replaced by Trey Ogden.


title: UFC on ESPN: Luque vs. Muhammad 2

text: Uriah Hall was expected to meet André Muniz in a middleweight bout at the main card. However on April 2, Hall withdrew due to undisclosed reasons. Muniz was also pulled after promotion wasn't able to find him a replacement.


title: UFC on ESPN: Luque vs. Muhammad 2

text: A welterweight bout between Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos and Mounir Lazzez was expected to take place at the event. However, Zaleski dos Santos withdrew the week of the fight due to personal reasons. He was replaced by Ange Loosa.


title: Metagenomics

text: Metagenomics is the study of genetic material recovered directly from environmental or clinical samples by a method called sequencing. The broad field may also be referred to as environmental genomics, ecogenomics, community genomics or microbiomics.


title: Metagenomics

text: While traditional microbiology and microbial genome sequencing and genomics rely upon cultivated clonal cultures, early environmental gene sequencing cloned specific genes (often the 16S rRNA gene) to produce a profile of diversity in a natural sample. Such work revealed that the vast majority of microbial biodiversity had been missed by cultivation-based methods.


title: Metagenomics

text: Because of its ability to reveal the previously hidden diversity of microscopic life, metagenomics offers a powerful lens for viewing the microbial world that has the potential to revolutionize understanding of the entire living world. As the price of DNA sequencing continues to fall, metagenomics now allows microbial ecology to be investigated at a much greater scale and detail than before. Recent studies use either "shotgun" or PCR directed sequencing to get largely unbiased samples of all genes from all the members of the sampled communities.


title: Metagenomics

text: The term "metagenomics" was first used by Jo Handelsman, Robert M. Goodman, Michelle R. Rondon, Jon Clardy, and Sean F. Brady, and first appeared in publication in 1998. The term metagenome referenced the idea that a collection of genes sequenced from the environment could be analyzed in a way analogous to the study of a single genome. In 2005, Kevin Chen and Lior Pachter (researchers at the University of California, Berkeley) defined metagenomics as "the application of modern genomics technique without the need for isolation and lab cultivation of individual species".


title: Metagenomics

text: Conventional sequencing begins with a culture of identical cells as a source of DNA. However, early metagenomic studies revealed that there are probably large groups of microorganisms in many environments that cannot be cultured and thus cannot be sequenced. These early studies focused on 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) sequences which are relatively short, often conserved within a species, and generally different between species. Many 16S rRNA sequences have been found which do not belong to any known cultured species, indicating that there are numerous non-isolated organisms. These surveys of ribosomal RNA genes taken directly from the environment revealed that cultivation based methods find less than 1% of the bacterial and archaeal species in a sample. Much of the interest in metagenomics comes from these discoveries that showed that the vast majority of microorganisms had previously gone unnoticed.


title: Metagenomics

text: In the 1980s early molecular work in the field was conducted by Norman R. Pace and colleagues, who used PCR to explore the diversity of ribosomal RNA sequences. The insights gained from these breakthrough studies led Pace to propose the idea of cloning DNA directly from environmental samples as early as 1985. This led to the first report of isolating and cloning bulk DNA from an environmental sample, published by Pace and colleagues in 1991 while Pace was in the Department of Biology at Indiana University. Considerable efforts ensured that these were not PCR false positives and supported the existence of a complex community of unexplored species. Although this methodology was limited to exploring highly conserved, non-protein coding genes, it did support early microbial morphology-based observations that diversity was far more complex than was known by culturing methods. Soon after that in 1995, Healy reported the metagenomic isolation of functional genes from "zoolibraries" constructed from a complex culture of environmental organisms grown in the laboratory on dried grasses. After leaving the Pace laboratory, Edward DeLong continued in the field and has published work that has largely laid the groundwork for environmental phylogenies based on signature 16S sequences, beginning with his group's construction of libraries from marine samples.


title: Metagenomics

text: In 2002, Mya Breitbart, Forest Rohwer, and colleagues used environmental shotgun sequencing (see below) to show that 200 liters of seawater contains over 5000 different viruses. Subsequent studies showed that there are more than a thousand viral species in human stool and possibly a million different viruses per kilogram of marine sediment, including many bacteriophages. Essentially all of the viruses in these studies were new species. In 2004, Gene Tyson, Jill Banfield, and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley and the Joint Genome Institute sequenced DNA extracted from an acid mine drainage system. This effort resulted in the complete, or nearly complete, genomes for a handful of bacteria and archaea that had previously resisted attempts to culture them.


title: Metagenomics

text: Beginning in 2003, Craig Venter, leader of the privately funded parallel of the Human Genome Project, has led the Global Ocean Sampling Expedition (GOS), circumnavigating the globe and collecting metagenomic samples throughout the journey. All of these samples were sequenced using shotgun sequencing, in hopes that new genomes (and therefore new organisms) would be identified. The pilot project, conducted in the Sargasso Sea, found DNA from nearly 2000 different species, including 148 types of bacteria never before seen. Venter thoroughly explored the West Coast of the United States, and completed a two-year expedition to explore the Baltic, Mediterranean and Black Seas. Analysis of the metagenomic data collected during this journey revealed two groups of organisms, one composed of taxa adapted to environmental conditions of 'feast or famine', and a second composed of relatively fewer but more abundantly and widely distributed taxa primarily composed of plankton.


title: Metagenomics

text: In 2005 Stephan C. Schuster at Penn State University and colleagues published the first sequences of an environmental sample generated with high-throughput sequencing, in this case massively parallel pyrosequencing developed by 454 Life Sciences. Another early paper in this area appeared in 2006 by Robert Edwards, Forest Rohwer, and colleagues at San Diego State University.


title: Metagenomics

text: Recovery of DNA sequences longer than a few thousand base pairs from environmental samples was very difficult until recent advances in molecular biological techniques allowed the construction of libraries in bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs), which provided better vectors for molecular cloning.


title: Metagenomics

text: Advances in bioinformatics, refinements of DNA amplification, and the proliferation of computational power have greatly aided the analysis of DNA sequences recovered from environmental samples, allowing the adaptation of shotgun sequencing to metagenomic samples (known also as whole metagenome shotgun or WMGS sequencing). The approach, used to sequence many cultured microorganisms and the human genome, randomly shears DNA, sequences many short sequences, and reconstructs them into a consensus sequence. Shotgun sequencing reveals genes present in environmental samples. Historically, clone libraries were used to facilitate this sequencing. However, with advances in high throughput sequencing technologies, the cloning step is no longer necessary and greater yields of sequencing data can be obtained without this labour-intensive bottleneck step. Shotgun metagenomics provides information both about which organisms are present and what metabolic processes are possible in the community. Because the collection of DNA from an environment is largely uncontrolled, the most abundant organisms in an environmental sample are most highly represented in the resulting sequence data. To achieve the high coverage needed to fully resolve the genomes of under-represented community members, large samples, often prohibitively so, are needed. On the other hand, the random nature of shotgun sequencing ensures that many of these organisms, which would otherwise go unnoticed using traditional culturing techniques, will be represented by at least some small sequence segments.


title: Metagenomics

text: An advantage to high throughput sequencing is that this technique does not require cloning the DNA before sequencing, removing one of the main biases and bottlenecks in environmental sampling. The first metagenomic studies conducted using high-throughput sequencing used massively parallel 454 pyrosequencing. Three other technologies commonly applied to environmental sampling are the Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine, the Illumina MiSeq or HiSeq and the Applied Biosystems SOLiD system. These techniques for sequencing DNA generate shorter fragments than Sanger sequencing; Ion Torrent PGM System and 454 pyrosequencing typically produces ~400 bp reads, Illumina MiSeq produces 400-700bp reads (depending on whether paired end options are used), and SOLiD produce 25–75 bp reads. Historically, these read lengths were significantly shorter than the typical Sanger sequencing read length of ~750 bp, however the Illumina technology is quickly coming close to this benchmark. However, this limitation is compensated for by the much larger number of sequence reads. In 2009, pyrosequenced metagenomes generate 200–500 megabases, and Illumina platforms generate around 20–50 gigabases, but these outputs have increased by orders of magnitude in recent years.


title: Metagenomics

text: An emerging approach combines shotgun sequencing and chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C), which measures the proximity of any two DNA sequences within the same cell, to guide microbial genome assembly. Long read sequencing technologies, including PacBio RSII and PacBio Sequel by Pacific Biosciences, and Nanopore MinION, GridION, PromethION by Oxford Nanopore Technologies, is another choice to get long shotgun sequencing reads that should make ease in assembling process.


title: Metagenomics

text: The data generated by metagenomics experiments are both enormous and inherently noisy, containing fragmented data representing as many as 10,000 species. The sequencing of the cow rumen metagenome generated 279 gigabases, or 279 billion base pairs of nucleotide sequence data, while the human gut microbiome gene catalog identified 3.3 million genes assembled from 567.7 gigabases of sequence data. Collecting, curating, and extracting useful biological information from datasets of this size represent significant computational challenges for researchers.


title: Metagenomics

text: The first step of metagenomic data analysis requires the execution of certain pre-filtering steps, including the removal of redundant, low-quality sequences and sequences of probable eukaryotic origin (especially in metagenomes of human origin). The methods available for the removal of contaminating eukaryotic genomic DNA sequences include Eu-Detect and DeConseq.


title: Metagenomics

text: DNA sequence data from genomic and metagenomic projects are essentially the same, but genomic sequence data offers higher coverage while metagenomic data is usually highly non-redundant. Furthermore, the increased use of second-generation sequencing technologies with short read lengths means that much of future metagenomic data will be error-prone. Taken in combination, these factors make the assembly of metagenomic sequence reads into genomes difficult and unreliable. Misassemblies are caused by the presence of repetitive DNA sequences that make assembly especially difficult because of the difference in the relative abundance of species present in the sample. Misassemblies can also involve the combination of sequences from more than one species into chimeric contigs.


title: Metagenomics

text: There are several assembly programs, most of which can use information from paired-end tags in order to improve the accuracy of assemblies. Some programs, such as Phrap or Celera Assembler, were designed to be used to assemble single genomes but nevertheless produce good results when assembling metagenomic data sets. Other programs, such as Velvet assembler, have been optimized for the shorter reads produced by second-generation sequencing through the use of de Bruijn graphs. The use of reference genomes allows researchers to improve the assembly of the most abundant microbial species, but this approach is limited by the small subset of microbial phyla for which sequenced genomes are available. After an assembly is created, an additional challenge is "metagenomic deconvolution", or determining which sequences come from which species in the sample.


title: Metagenomics

text: Metagenomic analysis pipelines use two approaches in the annotation of coding regions in the assembled contigs. The first approach is to identify genes based upon homology with genes that are already publicly available in sequence databases, usually by BLAST searches. This type of approach is implemented in the program MEGAN4. The second, "ab initio", uses intrinsic features of the sequence to predict coding regions based upon gene training sets from related organisms. This is the approach taken by programs such as GeneMark and GLIMMER. The main advantage of "ab initio" prediction is that it enables the detection of coding regions that lack homologs in the sequence databases; however, it is most accurate when there are large regions of contiguous genomic DNA available for comparison.


title: Metagenomics

text: Gene annotations provide the "what", while measurements of species diversity provide the "who". In order to connect community composition and function in metagenomes, sequences must be binned. Binning is the process of associating a particular sequence with an organism. In similarity-based binning, methods such as BLAST are used to rapidly search for phylogenetic markers or otherwise similar sequences in existing public databases. This approach is implemented in MEGAN. Another tool, PhymmBL, uses interpolated Markov models to assign reads. MetaPhlAn and AMPHORA are methods based on unique clade-specific markers for estimating organismal relative abundances with improved computational performances. Other tools, like mOTUs and MetaPhyler, use universal marker genes to profile prokaryotic species. With the mOTUs profiler is possible to profile species without a reference genome, improving the estimation of microbial community diversity. Recent methods, such as SLIMM, use read coverage landscape of individual reference genomes to minimize false-positive hits and get reliable relative abundances. In composition based binning, methods use intrinsic features of the sequence, such as oligonucleotide frequencies or codon usage bias. Once sequences are binned, it is possible to carry out comparative analysis of diversity and richness.


title: Metagenomics

text: The massive amount of exponentially growing sequence data is a daunting challenge that is complicated by the complexity of the metadata associated with metagenomic projects. Metadata includes detailed information about the three-dimensional (including depth, or height) geography and environmental features of the sample, physical data about the sample site, and the methodology of the sampling. This information is necessary both to ensure replicability and to enable downstream analysis. Because of its importance, metadata and collaborative data review and curation require standardized data formats located in specialized databases, such as the Genomes OnLine Database (GOLD).


title: Metagenomics

text: Several tools have been developed to integrate metadata and sequence data, allowing downstream comparative analyses of different datasets using a number of ecological indices. In 2007, Folker Meyer and Robert Edwards and a team at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago released the Metagenomics Rapid Annotation using Subsystem Technology server (MG-RAST) a community resource for metagenome data set analysis. As of June 2012 over 14.8 terabases (14x10 bases) of DNA have been analyzed, with more than 10,000 public data sets freely available for comparison within MG-RAST. Over 8,000 users now have submitted a total of 50,000 metagenomes to MG-RAST. The Integrated Microbial Genomes/Metagenomes (IMG/M) system also provides a collection of tools for functional analysis of microbial communities based on their metagenome sequence, based upon reference isolate genomes included from the Integrated Microbial Genomes (IMG) system and the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea (GEBA) project.


title: Metagenomics

text: One of the first standalone tools for analysing high-throughput metagenome shotgun data was MEGAN (MEta Genome ANalyzer). A first version of the program was used in 2005 to analyse the metagenomic context of DNA sequences obtained from a mammoth bone. Based on a BLAST comparison against a reference database, this tool performs both taxonomic and functional binning, by placing the reads onto the nodes of the NCBI taxonomy using a simple lowest common ancestor (LCA) algorithm or onto the nodes of the SEED or KEGG classifications, respectively.


title: Metagenomics

text: With the advent of fast and inexpensive sequencing instruments, the growth of databases of DNA sequences is now exponential (e.g., the NCBI GenBank database ). Faster and efficient tools are needed to keep pace with the high-throughput sequencing, because the BLAST-based approaches such as MG-RAST or MEGAN run slowly to annotate large samples (e.g., several hours to process a small/medium size dataset/sample ). Thus, ultra-fast classifiers have recently emerged, thanks to more affordable powerful servers. These tools can perform the taxonomic annotation at extremely high speed, for example CLARK (according to CLARK's authors, it can classify accurately "32 million metagenomic short reads per minute"). At such a speed, a very large dataset/sample of a billion short reads can be processed in about 30 minutes.


title: Metagenomics

text: With the increasing availability of samples containing ancient DNA and due to the uncertainty associated with the nature of those samples (ancient DNA damage), a fast tool capable of producing conservative similarity estimates has been made available. According to FALCON's authors, it can use relaxed thresholds and edit distances without affecting the memory and speed performance.


title: Metagenomics

text: Comparative analyses between metagenomes can provide additional insight into the function of complex microbial communities and their role in host health. Pairwise or multiple comparisons between metagenomes can be made at the level of sequence composition (comparing GC-content or genome size), taxonomic diversity, or functional complement. Comparisons of population structure and phylogenetic diversity can be made on the basis of 16S rRNA and other phylogenetic marker genes, or—in the case of low-diversity communities—by genome reconstruction from the metagenomic dataset. Functional comparisons between metagenomes may be made by comparing sequences against reference databases such as COG or KEGG, and tabulating the abundance by category and evaluating any differences for statistical significance. This gene-centric approach emphasizes the functional complement of the "community" as a whole rather than taxonomic groups, and shows that the functional complements are analogous under similar environmental conditions. Consequently, metadata on the environmental context of the metagenomic sample is especially important in comparative analyses, as it provides researchers with the ability to study the effect of habitat upon community structure and function.


title: Metagenomics

text: Additionally, several studies have also utilized oligonucleotide usage patterns to identify the differences across diverse microbial communities. Examples of such methodologies include the dinucleotide relative abundance approach by Willner et al. and the HabiSign approach of Ghosh et al. This latter study also indicated that differences in tetranucleotide usage patterns can be used to identify genes (or metagenomic reads) originating from specific habitats. Additionally some methods as TriageTools or Compareads detect similar reads between two read sets. The similarity measure they apply on reads is based on a number of identical words of length "k" shared by pairs of reads.


title: Metagenomics

text: A key goal in comparative metagenomics is to identify microbial group(s) which are responsible for conferring specific characteristics to a given environment. However, due to issues in the sequencing technologies artifacts need to be accounted for like in metagenomeSeq. Others have characterized inter-microbial interactions between the resident microbial groups. A GUI-based comparative metagenomic analysis application called Community-Analyzer has been developed by Kuntal et al.


title: Metagenomics

text: In many bacterial communities, natural or engineered (such as bioreactors), there is significant division of labor in metabolism (syntrophy), during which the waste products of some organisms are metabolites for others. In one such system, the methanogenic bioreactor, functional stability requires the presence of several syntrophic species (Syntrophobacterales and Synergistia) working together in order to turn raw resources into fully metabolized waste (methane). Using comparative gene studies and expression experiments with microarrays or proteomics researchers can piece together a metabolic network that goes beyond species boundaries. Such studies require detailed knowledge about which versions of which proteins are coded by which species and even by which strains of which species. Therefore, community genomic information is another fundamental tool (with metabolomics and proteomics) in the quest to determine how metabolites are transferred and transformed by a community.


title: Metagenomics

text: Metagenomics allows researchers to access the functional and metabolic diversity of microbial communities, but it cannot show which of these processes are active. The extraction and analysis of metagenomic mRNA (the metatranscriptome) provides information on the regulation and expression profiles of complex communities. Because of the technical difficulties (the short half-life of mRNA, for example) in the collection of environmental RNA there have been relatively few "in situ" metatranscriptomic studies of microbial communities to date. While originally limited to microarray technology, metatranscriptomics studies have made use of transcriptomics technologies to measure whole-genome expression and quantification of a microbial community, first employed in analysis of ammonia oxidation in soils.


title: Metagenomics

text: Metagenomic sequencing is particularly useful in the study of viral communities. As viruses lack a shared universal phylogenetic marker (as 16S RNA for bacteria and archaea, and 18S RNA for eukarya), the only way to access the genetic diversity of the viral community from an environmental sample is through metagenomics. Viral metagenomes (also called viromes) should thus provide more and more information about viral diversity and evolution. For example, a metagenomic pipeline called Giant Virus Finder showed the first evidence of existence of giant viruses in a saline desert and in Antarctic dry valleys.


title: Metagenomics

text: Metagenomics has the potential to advance knowledge in a wide variety of fields. It can also be applied to solve practical challenges in medicine, engineering, agriculture, sustainability and ecology.


title: Metagenomics

text: The soils in which plants grow are inhabited by microbial communities, with one gram of soil containing around 10-10 microbial cells which comprise about one gigabase of sequence information. The microbial communities which inhabit soils are some of the most complex known to science, and remain poorly understood despite their economic importance. Microbial consortia perform a wide variety of ecosystem services necessary for plant growth, including fixing atmospheric nitrogen, nutrient cycling, disease suppression, and sequester iron and other metals. Functional metagenomics strategies are being used to explore the interactions between plants and microbes through cultivation-independent study of these microbial communities. By allowing insights into the role of previously uncultivated or rare community members in nutrient cycling and the promotion of plant growth, metagenomic approaches can contribute to improved disease detection in crops and livestock and the adaptation of enhanced farming practices which improve crop health by harnessing the relationship between microbes and plants.


title: Metagenomics

text: Biofuels are fuels derived from biomass conversion, as in the conversion of cellulose contained in corn stalks, switchgrass, and other biomass into cellulosic ethanol. This process is dependent upon microbial consortia(association) that transform the cellulose into sugars, followed by the fermentation of the sugars into ethanol. Microbes also produce a variety of sources of bioenergy including methane and hydrogen.


title: Metagenomics

text: The efficient industrial-scale deconstruction of biomass requires novel enzymes with higher productivity and lower cost. Metagenomic approaches to the analysis of complex microbial communities allow the targeted screening of enzymes with industrial applications in biofuel production, such as glycoside hydrolases. Furthermore, knowledge of how these microbial communities function is required to control them, and metagenomics is a key tool in their understanding. Metagenomic approaches allow comparative analyses between convergent microbial systems like biogas fermenters or insect herbivores such as the fungus garden of the leafcutter ants.


title: Metagenomics

text: Microbial communities produce a vast array of biologically active chemicals that are used in competition and communication. Many of the drugs in use today were originally uncovered in microbes; recent progress in mining the rich genetic resource of non-culturable microbes has led to the discovery of new genes, enzymes, and natural products. The application of metagenomics has allowed the development of commodity and fine chemicals, agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals where the benefit of enzyme-catalyzed chiral synthesis is increasingly recognized.


title: Metagenomics

text: Two types of analysis are used in the bioprospecting of metagenomic data: function-driven screening for an expressed trait, and sequence-driven screening for DNA sequences of interest. Function-driven analysis seeks to identify clones expressing a desired trait or useful activity, followed by biochemical characterization and sequence analysis. This approach is limited by availability of a suitable screen and the requirement that the desired trait be expressed in the host cell. Moreover, the low rate of discovery (less than one per 1,000 clones screened) and its labor-intensive nature further limit this approach. In contrast, sequence-driven analysis uses conserved DNA sequences to design PCR primers to screen clones for the sequence of interest. In comparison to cloning-based approaches, using a sequence-only approach further reduces the amount of bench work required. The application of massively parallel sequencing also greatly increases the amount of sequence data generated, which require high-throughput bioinformatic analysis pipelines. The sequence-driven approach to screening is limited by the breadth and accuracy of gene functions present in public sequence databases. In practice, experiments make use of a combination of both functional and sequence-based approaches based upon the function of interest, the complexity of the sample to be screened, and other factors. An example of success using metagenomics as a biotechnology for drug discovery is illustrated with the malacidin antibiotics.


title: Metagenomics

text: Metagenomics can provide valuable insights into the functional ecology of environmental communities. Metagenomic analysis of the bacterial consortia found in the defecations of Australian sea lions suggests that nutrient-rich sea lion faeces may be an important nutrient source for coastal ecosystems. This is because the bacteria that are expelled simultaneously with the defecations are adept at breaking down the nutrients in the faeces into a bioavailable form that can be taken up into the food chain.


title: Metagenomics

text: DNA sequencing can also be used more broadly to identify species present in a body of water, debris filtered from the air, sample of dirt, or animal's faeces, and even detect diet items from blood meals. This can establish the range of invasive species and endangered species, and track seasonal populations.


title: Metagenomics

text: Metagenomics can improve strategies for monitoring the impact of pollutants on ecosystems and for cleaning up contaminated environments. Increased understanding of how microbial communities cope with pollutants improves assessments of the potential of contaminated sites to recover from pollution and increases the chances of bioaugmentation or biostimulation trials to succeed.


title: Metagenomics

text: Microbial communities play a key role in preserving human health, but their composition and the mechanism by which they do so remains mysterious. Metagenomic sequencing is being used to characterize the microbial communities from 15–18 body sites from at least 250 individuals. This is part of the Human Microbiome initiative with primary goals to determine if there is a core human microbiome, to understand the changes in the human microbiome that can be correlated with human health, and to develop new technological and bioinformatics tools to support these goals.


title: Metagenomics

text: Another medical study as part of the MetaHit (Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract) project consisted of 124 individuals from Denmark and Spain consisting of healthy, overweight, and irritable bowel disease patients. The study attempted to categorize the depth and phylogenetic diversity of gastrointestinal bacteria. Using Illumina GA sequence data and SOAPdenovo, a de Bruijn graph-based tool specifically designed for assembly short reads, they were able to generate 6.58 million contigs greater than 500 bp for a total contig length of 10.3 Gb and a N50 length of 2.2 kb.