title: 2020 French Open – Men's singles

text: Lorenzo Giustino defeated Corentin Moutet 0–6, 7–6, 7–6, 2–6, 18–16 in the first round. The match was the second-longest in French Open history, lasting 6 hours and 5 minutes, and the fourth-longest in major history. Taylor Fritz and Lorenzo Sonego played the longest tie-break in French Open history: Sonego won the third set tie-break 19–17 to win their third-round match 7–6, 6–3, 7–6.


title: 2020 French Open – Men's singles

text: Jannik Sinner became the first man to reach the quarterfinals of Roland Garros on debut since Nadal in 2005 and the youngest quarterfinalist since Djokovic in 2006. He also became the first man born in the 21st century to reach a major quarterfinal.


title: Bannerghatta National Park

text: Bannerghatta National Park is a national park in India, located near Bangalore, Karnataka. It was founded in 1970 and declared as a national park in 1974. In 2002, a small portion of the park became a zoological garden, the Bannerghatta Biological Park.


title: Bannerghatta National Park

text: There are ancient temples in the park for worship and it is a destination for trekking and hiking. Within the national park area are six rural villages enclosed within three large enclosures for sheep and cattle farming. This park offers a wide range of diverse wildlife to the exploradoras. Coming from the finest of Bengaluru, Karnataka, this park offers a guided bus tour all along the 6 km safari roads, which is specially made for safarists and foreign tourist gatherers.


title: Bannerghatta National Park

text: The 65,127.5 acre (260.51 km) national park is located about 22 km south of Bangalore in the hills of the Anekal range with an elevation of 1245 - 1634m. The park has a hilly terrain of granite sheets under moist deciduous forest valleys and scrubland on higher areas. Sixteen villages border the park. Most of the national park consists of artificial forest, and some animals have been introduced. The park is part of a wildlife corridor for elephants which connects the BR Hills and the Sathyamangalam forest. The park is contiguous with Talli reserve forest in the southeast and Bilikal forest in the south.


title: Bannerghatta National Park

text: The park's rainfall is 700 mm per year. The Suvarnamukhi stream runs through the national park. On 15 May 2014, four bore wells were opened to provide water in dry times.


title: Bannerghatta National Park

text: One hundred and one species of birds have been recorded in the park. The fauna pose some risk to humans. In August 2012, a man was trampled to death by an elephant. Occasionally, animals leave the reserve, coming into contact with humans. For example, elephants have been sighted on the Bantamweight-Anekal road which passes close to the park. In 2007, a leopard and her cubs entered a local school.


title: Bannerghatta National Park

text: The park is threatened by multiple granite quarries operating around the national park. These quarries are located alarmingly close to critical elephant corridors inside the national park such as Kardikal - Madeswara corridor. While there is ban on mining and granite quarrying around the national park within a radius of One km from the boundary demarcated as "Safe Zone", quarries operate unabatedly. Vehicular movement is also uncontrolled. Tremors from the explosives used in the quarry operations are felt across a radius of at least five km adversely affecting elephants and other wild animals.


title: Molniya orbit

text: A Molniya orbit (, "Lightning") is a type of satellite orbit designed to provide communications and remote sensing coverage over high latitudes. It is a highly elliptical orbit with an inclination of 63.4 degrees, an argument of perigee of 270 degrees, and an orbital period of approximately half a sidereal day. The name comes from the "Molniya" satellites, a series of Soviet/Russian civilian and military communications satellites which have used this type of orbit since the mid-1960s.


title: Molniya orbit

text: The Molniya orbit has a long dwell time over the hemisphere of interest, while moving very quickly over the other. In practice, this places it over either Russia or Canada for the majority of its orbit, providing a high angle of view to communications and monitoring satellites covering these high-latitude areas. Geostationary orbits, which are necessarily inclined over the equator, can only view these regions from a low angle, hampering performance. In practice, a satellite in a Molniya orbit serves the same purpose for high latitudes as a geostationary satellite does for equatorial regions, except that multiple satellites are required for continuous coverage.


title: Molniya orbit

text: Satellites placed in Molniya orbits have been used for television broadcasting, telecommunications, military communications, relaying, weather monitoring, early warning systems and some classified purposes.


title: Molniya orbit

text: The Molniya orbit was discovered by Soviet scientists in the 1960s as a high-latitude communications alternative to geostationary orbits, which require large launch energies to achieve a high perigee and to change inclination to orbit over the equator (especially when launched from Russian latitudes). As a result, OKB-1 sought a less energy-demanding orbit. Studies found that this could be achieved using a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee over Russian territory. The orbit's name refers to the "lightning" speed with which the satellite passes through the perigee.


title: Molniya orbit

text: The first use of the Molniya orbit was by the communications satellite series of the same name. After two launch failures, and one satellite failure in 1964, the first successful satellite to use this orbit, Molniya 1-1, launched on 23 April 1965. The early Molniya-1 satellites were used for civilian television, telecommunication and long-range military communications, but they were also fitted with cameras used for weather monitoring, and possibly for assessing clear areas for Zenit spy satellites. The original Molniya satellites had a lifespan of approximately 1.5 years, as their orbits were disrupted by perturbations, and they had to be constantly replaced.


title: Molniya orbit

text: The succeeding series, the Molniya-2, provided both military and civilian broadcasting and was used to create the Orbita television network, spanning the Soviet Union. These were in turn replaced by the Molniya-3 design. A satellite called Mayak was designed to supplement and replace the Molniya satellites in 1997, but the project was cancelled, and the Molniya-3 was replaced by the Meridian satellites, the first of which launched in 2006. The Soviet US-K early warning satellites, which watch for American rocket launches, were launched in Molniya orbits from 1967, as part of the Oko system.


title: Molniya orbit

text: From 1971, the American Jumpseat and Trumpet military satellites were launched into Molniya orbits (and possibly used to intercept Soviet communications from the Molniya satellites). Detailed information about both projects remains classified . This was followed by the American SDS constellation, which operates with a mixture of Molniya and geostationary orbits. These satellites are used to relay signals from lower flying satellites back to ground stations in the United States and have been active in some capacity since 1976. A Russian satellite constellation called Tyulpan was designed in 1994 to support communications at high latitudes, but it did not progress past the planning phase.


title: Molniya orbit

text: In 2015 and 2017 Russia launched two "Tundra" satellites into a Molniya orbit, despite their name, as part of its EKS early warning system.


title: Molniya orbit

text: Much of the area of the former Soviet Union, and Russia in particular, is located at high northern latitudes. To broadcast to these latitudes from a geostationary orbit (above the Earth's equator) requires considerable power due to the low elevation angles, and the extra distance and atmospheric attenuation that comes with it. Sites located above 81° latitude are unable to view geostationary satellites at all, and as a rule of thumb, elevation angles of less than 10° can cause problems, depending on the communications frequency.


title: Molniya orbit

text: A satellite in a Molniya orbit is better suited to communications in these regions, because it looks more directly down on them during large portions of its orbit. With an apogee altitude as high as and an apogee sub-satellite point of 63.4 degrees north, it spends a considerable portion of its orbit with excellent visibility in the northern hemisphere, from Russia as well as from northern Europe, Greenland and Canada.


title: Molniya orbit

text: While satellites in Molniya orbits require considerably less launch energy than those in geostationary orbits (especially launching from high latitudes), their ground stations need steerable antennas to track the spacecraft, links must be switched between satellites in a constellation and range changes cause variations in signal amplitude. Additionally, there is a greater need for station-keeping, and the spacecraft will pass through the Van Allen radiation belt four times per day.


title: Molniya orbit

text: Similar orbits with an argument of perigee of 90° could allow high-latitude coverage in the southern hemisphere. A proposed constellation, the "Antarctic Broadband Program", would have used satellites in an inverted Molniya orbit to provide broadband internet service to facilities in Antarctica. Initially funded by the now defunct Australian Space Research Program, it did not progress beyond initial development.


title: Molniya orbit

text: Permanent high-elevation coverage of a large area of Earth (like the whole of Russia, where some parts are as far south as 45°N) requires a constellation of at least three spacecraft in Molniya orbits. If three spacecraft are used, then each spacecraft will be active for a period of eight hours per orbit, centered around apogee, as illustrated in figure 4. Figure 5 shows the satellite's field of view around the apogee.


title: Molniya orbit

text: The Earth completes half a rotation in twelve hours, so the apogees of successive Molniya orbits will alternate between one half of the northern hemisphere and the other. For the original Molniya orbit, the apogees were placed over Russia and North America, but by changing the right ascension of the ascending node this can be varied. The coverage from a satellite in a Molniya orbit over Russia is shown in figures 6 to 8, and over North America in figures 9 to 11.


title: Molniya orbit

text: The orbits of the three spacecraft should then have the same orbital parameters, but different right ascensions of the ascending nodes, with their passes over the apogees separated by 7.97 hours. Since each satellite has an operational period of approximately eight hours, when one spacecraft travels four hours after its apogee passage (see figure 8 or figure 11), then the next satellite will enter its operational period, with the view of the earth shown in figure 6 (or figure 9), and the switch-over can take place. Note that the two spacecraft at the time of switch-over are separated by about , so that the ground stations only have to move their antennas a few degrees to acquire the new spacecraft.


title: Molniya orbit

text: The argument of perigee is set at 270°, causing the satellite to experience apogee at the most northerly point of its orbit. For any future applications over the southern hemisphere, it would instead be set at 90°.


title: Molniya orbit

text: In general, the oblateness of the Earth perturbs the argument of perigee (formula_1), so that it gradually changes with time. If we only consider the first-order coefficient formula_2, the perigee will change according to equation , unless it is constantly corrected with station-keeping thruster burns.


title: Molniya orbit

text: where formula_3 is the orbital inclination, formula_4 is the eccentricity, formula_5 is mean motion in degrees per day, formula_2 is the perturbing factor, formula_7 is the radius of the earth, formula_8 is the semimajor axis, and formula_9 is in degrees per day.


title: Molniya orbit

text: To avoid this expenditure of fuel, the Molniya orbit uses an inclination of 63.4°, for which the factor formula_10 is zero, so that there is no change in the position of perigee over time. An orbit designed in this manner is called a frozen orbit.


title: Molniya orbit

text: To ensure the geometry relative to the ground stations repeats every 24 hours, the period should be about half a sidereal day, keeping the longitudes of the apogees constant.


title: Molniya orbit

text: However, the oblateness of the Earth also perturbs the right ascension of the ascending node (formula_11), changing the nodal period and causing the ground track to drift over time at the rate shown in equation .


title: Molniya orbit

text: Since the inclination of a Molniya orbit is fixed (as above), this perturbation is formula_13 degrees per day. To compensate, the orbital period is adjusted so that the longitude of the apogee changes enough to cancel out this effect.


title: Molniya orbit

text: The eccentricity of the orbit is based on the differences in altitudes of its apogee and perigee. To maximise the amount of time that the satellite spends over the apogee, the eccentricity should be set as high as possible. However, the perigee needs to be high enough to keep the satellite substantially above the atmosphere to minimize drag (~600km), and the orbital period needs to be kept to approximately half a sidereal day (as above). These two factors constrain the eccentricity, which becomes approximately 0.737.


title: Molniya orbit

text: The exact height of a satellite in a Molniya orbit varies between missions, but a typical orbit will have a perigee of approximately and an apogee of , for a semi-major axis of .


title: Molniya orbit

text: To track satellites using Molniya orbits, scientists use the SDP4 simplified perturbations model, which calculates the location of a satellite based on orbital shape, drag, radiation, gravitation effects from the sun and moon, and earth resonance terms.


title: Tony Darrow

text: Darrow was born in the East New York section of Brooklyn. He had plenty of opportunity to observe would-be mobsters and their attitudes while growing up in his neighborhood in Brooklyn. As a teenager, he gravitated towards show business, entering and winning talent shows while working odd jobs.


title: Tony Darrow

text: After ten years of singing in nightclubs, Darrow received an offer to appear in what turned out to be a cult film, "Street Trash" in which he played a mobster. Several months after "Street Trash", Darrow was contacted by the film director Martin Scorsese. It turned out that Scorsese had seen "Street Trash" and wanted him to audition for a role in "Goodfellas". He was successful and was cast as the owner of the Bamboo Lounge, Sonny. Darrow was also in the Woody Allen films "Bullets over Broadway", "Mighty Aphrodite", "Deconstructing Harry", "Small Time Crooks" and "Sweet and Lowdown".


title: Tony Darrow

text: In 1999, Darrow played a large role in "Analyze This" with Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal. Later the same year, he appeared in "Mickey Blue Eyes" with Hugh Grant, and got another big role as mobster Larry Barese in the HBO hit series "The Sopranos", which he was on for the entire series run (1999–2007). More recently, Darrow starred in the independent film "Lynch Mob".


title: Tony Darrow

text: In June 2009, Darrow was charged with extortion in a 2004 incident. Along with Gambino crime family soldier Joseph "Joey Boy" Orlando and associate Giovanni "Johnny" Monteleone, Darrow was accused of ordering the maiming of a man in Monticello, New York who owed money to a loan shark. Darrow and Orlando both pleaded guilty in federal court to these charges in February 2011, in exchange for a sentence of up to 33 months. However, Monteleone cooperated with the FBI. At sentencing, Darrow's attorney successfully argued that Darrow's 50+ year history of community service, medical condition, and lack of prior criminal history warranted a sentence of house arrest, followed by a period of probation. Orlando was sentenced to 51 months in prison and Darrow received six months of house arrest.


title: Baltic amber

text: The Baltic region is home to the largest known deposit of amber, called Baltic amber or succinite. It was produced sometime during the Eocene epoch, but exactly when is controversial. It has been estimated that these forests created more than 100,000 tons of amber. Today, more than 90% of the world's amber comes from Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia. It is a major source of income for the region; the local Kaliningrad Amber Combine extracted 250 tonnes of it in 2014, 400 tonnes in 2015.


title: Baltic amber

text: "Baltic amber" was formerly thought to include amber from the Bitterfeld brown coal mines in Saxony (Eastern Germany). Bitterfeld amber was previously believed to be only 20–22 million years old (Miocene), but a comparison of the animal inclusions in 2003 suggested that it was possibly Baltic amber that was redeposited in a Miocene deposit. Further study of insect taxa in the ambers has shown Bitterfeld amber to be from the same forest as the Baltic amber forest, but separately deposited from a more southerly section, in a similar manner as Ukrainian Rovno amber. Other sources of Baltic amber have been listed as coming from Poland and Russia.


title: Baltic amber

text: "In situ" Baltic amber is derived from the sediments of the geological formation termed the Prussian Formation, formerly called the "Amber Formation", with the main amber bearing horizon being referred to as "Blue Earth", so named due to its glauconite content. The formation is exposed in the northern part of the Sambia Peninsula in Kaliningrad. Much of the Baltic amber has been secondarily redeposited in Pleistocene glacial till deposits across the North European Plain. It has been proposed that the amber is secondarily redeposited in coastal lagoonal conditions after a marine transgression of the amber forest. The age of the amber is controversial, though it is generally intepreted as having been produced during the Eocene epoch (56-34 million years ago). Different authors have given estimates of 40-47 million years ago and 35-43 million years ago as the age of the amber.


title: Baltic amber

text: It is universally agreed that the amber is coniferous in origin. It was thought since the 1850s that the resin that became amber was produced by the tree "Pinites succinifer", but research in the 1980s came to the conclusion that the resin originates from several species. More recently, it has been proposed, on the evidence of Fourier-transform infrared microspectroscopy (FTIR) analysis of amber and resin from living trees, that conifers of the family Sciadopityaceae were responsible. The only extant representative of this family is the Japanese umbrella pine, "Sciadopitys verticillata".


title: Baltic amber

text: The structure of Baltic amber (succinite) is complex. It is not a polymer, because it is not composed of a repeating pattern of mers of the same type. Rather it has a macromolecular structure arranged in a crosslinked network, in which the pores (free spaces) are filled by components of molecular structure (e.g. by mono- and sesquiterpenes). Thus the chemical structure of the amber may be described as a supramolecule. The structure makes the amber denser, harder and more resistant to external factors. It also makes possible good preservation of plant and animal inclusions.


title: Baltic amber

text: Numerous extinct genera and species of plants and animals have been discovered and scientifically described from inclusions in Baltic amber. Inclusions of insects make up over 98% of the animals preserved in the amber, while all other arthropods, annelids, molluscs, nematodes, protozoans contribute less than 0.5% of the animals. Vertebrates are another 0.5% of the animals included and mostly are represented by mammal fur, feathers, and reptiles.


title: German Samoa

text: German Samoa () was a German protectorate from 1900 to 1920, consisting of the islands of Upolu, Savai'i, Apolima and Manono, now wholly within the independent state of Samoa, formerly "Western Samoa". Samoa was the last German colonial acquisition in the Pacific basin, received following the Tripartite Convention signed at Washington on 2 December 1899 with ratifications exchanged on 16 February 1900. It was the only German colony in the Pacific, aside from the Kiautschou Bay concession in China, that was administered separately from German New Guinea.


title: German Samoa

text: In 1855 J.C. Godeffroy & Sohn expanded its trading business into the Pacific following negotiations by August Unshelm, Godeffroy's agent in Valparaíso. He sailed out to the Samoan Islands, which were then known as the Navigator Islands. During the second half of the 19th century German influence in Samoa expanded with large scale plantation operations being introduced for coconut, cacao and hevea rubber cultivation, especially on the island of 'Upolu where German firms monopolised copra and cocoa bean processing.


title: German Samoa

text: The trading operations of J.C. Godeffroy & Sohn extended to islands in the Central Pacific. In 1865 a trading captain acting on behalf of J.C. Godeffroy & Sohn obtained a 25-year lease to the eastern islet of Niuoku of Nukulaelae Atoll. J. C. Godeffroy und Sohn was taken over in 1879 by Handels-und Plantagen-Gesellschaft der Südsee-Inseln zu Hamburg (DHPG). Competition in the trading operations in the Central Pacific came from Ruge, Hedemann & Co, established in 1875, which was succeeded by H. M. Ruge and Company until that firm failed in about 1887.


title: German Samoa

text: Tensions caused in part by the conflicting interests of the German traders and plantation owners and British business enterprises and American business interests led to the first Samoan Civil War. The war was fought roughly between 1886 and 1894, primarily between Samoans though the German military intervened on several occasions. The United States and the United Kingdom opposed the German activity which led to a confrontation in Apia Harbour in 1887.


title: German Samoa

text: In 1899 after the Second Samoan Civil War the Samoan Islands were divided by the three involved powers. The Samoa Tripartite Convention gave control of the islands west of 171 degrees west longitude to Germany, the eastern islands to the United States (present-day American Samoa) and the United Kingdom was compensated with other territories in the Pacific and West Africa.


title: German Samoa

text: During the colonial years new companies were formed to greatly expand agricultural activities which in turn increased tax revenues for public works that further stimulated economic growth; “...over all, the period of German rule was the most progressive, economically, that the country has experienced.” J. C. Godeffroy, as the leading trading and plantation company on Samoa, maintained communications among its various subdivisions and branches and the home base at Hamburg with its own fleet of ships. Since the Samoan cultural envelope did not include “labor for hire,” the importation of Chinese (coolie) laborers (and to a lesser extent Melanesians from New Guinea working for DHPG) was implemented, and “...by 1914 over 2,000 Chinese were in the colony, providing an effective labor force for the [German] plantations."


title: German Samoa

text: The German colonial period lasted for 14 years and officially began with the raising of the imperial flag on 1 March 1900. Wilhelm Solf became the first governor.


title: German Samoa

text: In its political relations with the Samoan people, Solf's government showed similar qualities of intelligence and care as in the economic arena. He skillfully grafted Samoan institutions into the new system of colonial government by the acceptance of native customs. Solf himself learned many of the customs and rituals important to the Samoan people, observing cultural etiquette including the ceremonial drinking of kava.


title: German Samoa

text: “German rule brought peace and order for the first time. ... Authority, in the person of the governor, became paternal, fair, and absolute. Berlin was far away; there was no cable or radio.” The German administrators inherited a system by which some two hundred leading Samoans held various public offices. Over the years, rivalries for these positions, as well as appointments by colonial officials created tensions that dissident "matai" (chiefs) gathered together into a militant movement to eventually march armed on Apia in 1909. Governor Solf met the Samoans, his resolute personality persuaded them to return home. However, political agitation continued to simmer, several warships arrived and Solf's patience came to an end. He had ten of the leaders, including their wives, children and retainers, in all 72 souls, deported to Saipan in the German Mariana Islands, in effect terminating the revolt.


title: German Samoa

text: Energetic efforts by colonial administrators established the first public school system; a hospital was built and staffed and enlarged as needed. Of all colonial possessions of the European powers in the Pacific, German Samoa was by far the best-roaded; all roads up until 1942 had been constructed under German direction. The imperial grants from the Berlin treasury which had marked the first eight years of German rule were no longer needed after 1908. Samoa had become a self-supporting colony. Wilhelm Solf left Samoa in 1910 to be appointed Colonial Secretary at Berlin; he was succeeded as governor by Erich Schultz, the former chief justice in the protectorate. The Germans built the Telefunken Railroad from Apia onto the Mount Vaea for transporting building materials for the 120 m high mast of their Telefunken wireless station, which was inaugurated as planned on 1 August 1914, just a few days after the beginning of World War I.


title: German Samoa

text: The German colonial administrator used the former home of writer Robert Louis Stevenson as a residence; the building is now the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum.


title: German Samoa

text: Other than native Samoan police, Germany had no armed forces stationed in the islands. The small gunboat SMS "Geier" and the unarmed survey ship "Planet" were assigned to the so-called "Australian Station" (encompassing all German South Seas protectorates, not the British dominion Australia), but "Geier" never reached Samoa.


title: German Samoa

text: British born Herbert Morley (explorer) who, in 1914, was in business in Samoa, has sent a letter dated July 27, 1914, therein he tells of six German warships docking off Samoa. The letter was publicized in Keighley News on November 17, 1914.


title: German Samoa

text: At the behest of the United Kingdom the colony was invaded unopposed on the morning of 29 August 1914 by troops of the Samoa Expeditionary Force. Vice Admiral Count Maximilian von Spee of the German East Asia Squadron gained knowledge of the occupation and hastened to Samoa with the armored cruisers SMS "Scharnhorst" and SMS "Gneisenau", arriving off Apia on 14 September 1914. He determined however that a landing would only be of temporary advantage in an Allied dominated sea and the cruisers departed. New Zealand occupied the German colony through to 1920, then governed the islands until independence in 1962 as a League of Nations Class C Mandate at first and then as a United Nations Trust Territory after 1946.


title: German Samoa

text: In 1914, a series of drafts were made for proposed coats of arms and flags for the German colonies, including German Samoa. However, World War I broke out before the designs were finished, and the symbols were never used. Following its defeat in the war, Germany lost all its colonies, so the coats of arms and flags became redundant.


title: Precursor (chemistry)

text: In chemistry, a precursor is a compound that participates in a chemical reaction that produces another compound.


title: Precursor (chemistry)

text: In biochemistry, the term "precursor" often refers more specifically to a chemical compound preceding another in a metabolic pathway, such as a protein precursor.


title: Precursor (chemistry)

text: In 1988, the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances introduced detailed provisions and requirements relating the control of precursors used to produce drugs of abuse.


title: Precursor (chemistry)

text: In Europe the Regulation (EC) No. 273/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council on drug precursors was adopted on 11 February 2004. (European law on drug precursors)


title: Precursor (chemistry)

text: On January 15, 2013, the Regulation (EU) No. 98/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the marketing and use of explosives precursors was adopted.


title: Precursor (chemistry)

text: The Regulation harmonises rules across Europe on the making available, introduction, possession and use, of certain substances or mixtures that could be misused for the illicit manufacture of explosives.


title: Precursor (chemistry)

text: A portable, advanced sensor based on infrared spectroscopy in a hollow fiber matched to a silicon-micromachined fast gas chromatography column can analyze illegal stimulants and precursors with nanogram-level sensitivity.


title: Precursor (chemistry)

text: Technologies able to detect precursors in the environment could contribute to an early location of sites where illegal substances (both explosives and drugs of abuse) are produced.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: The Posse Comitatus (Latin, "") is a loosely organized American far-right populist social movement which began in the late 1960s. Its members spread a conspiracy-minded, anti-government and anti-Semitic message linked to White supremacy aiming to counter what they believe is an attack on their social and political rights as white Christians.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: Many Posse members practiced survivalism and played a role in the formation of armed citizens' militias in the 1990s. The Posse Comitatus pioneered the use of false liens and other types of "paper terrorism" in order to harass their opponents by mounting frivolous legal actions against them. As the Posse Comitatus began their decline in popularity at the turn of the 21st century, their tactics and ideology evolved into those of the Christian Patriot movement and the sovereign citizen movement.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: Due to the strong ties which they forged with the white supremacist Christian Identity movement, members of the Posse Comitatus believe that they are the true Israelites, the people who were chosen by God. They state that the Jews seek to help Satan destroy civilization, and undermine white citizens' rights by means of the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: Posse charters were first issued in Portland, Oregon in 1969, by Henry Lamont Beach, "a retired dry cleaner and a one-time member of the Silver Shirts, a Nazi-inspired and clerical fascist organization which was established in America after Hitler took power in Germany." One expert has considered William Potter Gale the founder of the movement.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: Posse members believe that there is no legitimate form of government above that of the county level and no higher law authority than the county sheriff. If the sheriff refuses to carry out the will of the county's citizens: "he shall be removed by the Posse to the most populated intersection of streets in the township and at high noon be hung by the neck, the body remaining until sundown as an example to those who would subvert the law."


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: Some Posse members embraced the anti-Semitic and white supremacist beliefs of Christian Identity. Some believe that the U.S. federal government is illegitimate and in the hands of a Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), the supposed international Jewish conspiracy. In 1985, a member of the Posse Comitatus announced: "Our nation is now completely under the control of the International Invisible government of the World Jewry."


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: Members of the Posse Comitatus frequently refuse to pay taxes, obtain driver's licenses, or comply with regulatory authorities. They deny the validity of United States fiat money because it is not backed by gold, which they claim the Constitution requires.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: They draw up unusual legal documents and attempt to record them, they declare their independence from the United States, or they claim to file "common law" liens against their perceived enemies such as Internal Revenue Service employees or judges. They are frequently involved in various tax protests, and they have invoked arguments which have been popularized by tax protesters.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: The Posse Comitatus made national news when, on February 13, 1983, Posse member Gordon Kahl killed two federal marshals who had come to arrest him in North Dakota and became a fugitive. Another shootout ensued on June 3, 1983, in which Kahl and Lawrence County, Arkansas, Sheriff Gene Matthews were killed. Other members of the group have also been convicted of crimes ranging from tax evasion and counterfeiting to threatening the lives of IRS agents and judges.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: The organization also demonstrated to support its members over other issues. On September 2, 1975, Francis Earl Gillings, the founder of a San Joaquin County Posse group, led a group of armed Posse members to prevent United Farm Workers union organizers from attempting to organize non-union tomato pickers. As sheriff's deputies attempted to arrest Gillings on a traffic warrant, one got into a scuffle with Gillings and a shot was fired.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: On August 15, 2012, five suspects were arrested in connection with the fatal shooting of two sheriff's deputies and wounding two others in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana. Terry Smith, 44; Brian Smith, 24; Derrick Smith, 22; Teniecha Bright, 21; and Kyle David Joekel, 28, were identified, with Brian Smith and Joekel identified as the shooters in the incident. The men are rumored to be affiliated with a Posse Comitatus group. On August 17, 2012, two more suspects—Chanel Skains, 37, and Britney Keith, 23—were charged with accessory after the fact.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: The direct ideological descendants of the Posse Comitatus movement were found in the "Christian Patriot" branch of the Patriot movement. Most Christian Patriot groups adhere to Christian Identity's white supremacist views as well as the Posse Comitatus' view that the American government had deprived citizens of their natural "common law" rights. They have notably espoused Gale's concept of "individual sovereignty", which developed into the broader sovereign citizen movement.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: The legal theories of Posse Comitatus have been further developed by the sovereign citizen movement, which claims that a U.S. citizen can become a "sovereign citizen" and thereby be subject only to common law or "constitutional law," not to statutory law (including most taxes). The Uniform Commercial Code plays a part in these legal theories.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: Some within the movement see African Americans, who only gained legal citizenship after the Civil War and passage of the 14th Amendment, as "14th Amendment citizens" with fewer rights than whites. However, African-American groups have adopted sovereign citizen ideology and developed their own version of the movement's beliefs.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: The sovereign citizen movement in turn gave rise to the "redemption movement," which claims that the U.S. government has enslaved its citizens by using them as collateral against foreign debt. Redemption scheme promoters sell instructions explaining how citizens can "free" themselves by filing particular government forms in a particular order using particular wording. The movement "has earned its promoters untold profits, buried courts and other agencies under tons of worthless paper, and led to scores of arrests and convictions."


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) classifies some sovereign citizens ("extreme sovereign citizen extremists") as a domestic terrorist movement. In 2010 the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) estimated that approximately 100,000 Americans were "hard-core sovereign believers" with another 200,000 "just starting out by testing sovereign techniques for resisting everything from speeding tickets to drug charges."


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: In the late 1970s, the Posse Comitatus attempted to take over Alpine County, California, by settling there and fielding candidates in local elections.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: Alpine County is in the Sierra Nevada Mountains east of Stockton on the west and east slope of Ebbetts Pass on State Highway 4. The 2010 population is 1,175 people. The Posse thought winning local elections in Alpine County was their best opportunity to take control of a single county. The group fielded a candidate for sheriff and registered fictitious voters using post office boxes and vacant lots as their addresses. Six people were prosecuted for voter fraud, the false registration thrown out, and the incumbent sheriff was re-elected.


title: Posse Comitatus (organization)

text: The posse had a presence in Tigerton, Wisconsin, until a crackdown by government prosecutors in the early 1980s left many of the group's leaders imprisoned.


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: The Bethnal Green trio are Amira Abase, Shamima Begum, and Kadiza Sultana, three British girls who attended the Bethnal Green Academy in London before leaving home in February 2015 to join the Islamic State. According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, they were among an estimated 550 women and girls from Western countries who had travelled to join IS—part of what some have called "a jihadi, girl-power subculture", the so-called Brides of ISIL. The events were adapted into the Swedish TV series "Caliphate".


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: On 17 February 2015, Abase, Begum, and Sultana flew via Turkish Airlines from Gatwick Airport in West Sussex, England, to Istanbul, Turkey. Their families went to Turkey in March to investigate their disappearance, deeming the police investigation inadequate.


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: Their disappearance has been attributed to Aqsa Mahmood, a woman from Glasgow who joined ISIL in 2013. There were electronic communications between the girls and Mahmood. Mahmood faces criminal charges if she returns. Mahmood denies the allegations.


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: In March 2015, footage was circulated of Abase Hussen, father of Amira Abase, at a 2012 rally led by Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary against the film "Innocence of Muslims". The Metropolitan Police examined the footage but said that it was unlikely that offences had been committed. Hussen said in April that he felt ashamed of his involvement in the rally, as he did not know who had organised it.


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: The girls stole family jewellery to pay for their flights. Begum married Dutch Islamic convert and IS jihadi fighter Yago Riedijk just days after arriving in Raqqa. They had three children who died from malnutrition and disease.


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: At a 2015 Home Affairs Select Committee, then Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe stated that they would not face criminal charges if they returned to the United Kingdom.


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: In the UK, the disappearance resulted in the Metropolitan Police giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons on its circumstances in March 2015. The families of the girls received an apology from Scotland Yard, who did not tell them about Sharmeena Begum (unrelated), the other girl from their school who went to Syria in 2014.


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: British Prime Minister David Cameron said that individual institutions should not be made into "scapegoats" for the disappearance of the three girls. Contrary to the stance of the Metropolitan Police, Cameron said, "Whoever has gone out to join a terrorist organisation is breaking the law and has to face the consequences of breaking the law and we have to let the law take its course in the proper way".


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: In March 2015, a travel ban was imposed upon five girls from the Bethnal Green Academy due to concerns from social services that the girls attend the same school as the three who had already joined the group, stating that it was in the public interest.


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: It was reported that the Bethnal Green Trio were married to foreign jihadists, and that they then moved into the homes of their new husbands in ISIL's de facto capital of Raqqa.


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: Sultana was said to have married a western ISIL fighter with Somali heritage, but wanted to return to the UK after he was killed in battle. Shortly afterwards, she was killed in a Russian airstrike. Her family said in a phone interview with ITV in August 2016 that they believed she died in an airstrike in May 2016 at the age of 17 while planning to escape. The lawyer who represents the family of the teenagers, Tasnime Akunjee, told ITV that she became too scared of making an escape attempt after another girl, Samra Kesinovic, was beaten to death for trying to escape.


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: Abase married an 18-year-old Australian jihadist, Abdullah Elmir, in July 2016 who was reported by Australian intelligence agencies to have been killed in coalition airstrikes. The current fate or whereabouts of Abase are unknown.


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: Shamima Begum married a Dutch jihadist recruit, Yago Riedijk. They had three children, all now deceased.


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: In February 2019, "The Times" journalist Anthony Loyd found Begum in a Syrian refugee camp. During the interview, Begum said the last time she saw her husband was when they fled the village of Baghuz, Isis’ final stronghold, at the beginning of February that year. He was later reported to have surrendered to fighters allied with the Syrian Democratic Forces. She also revealed that she was pregnant and hoped to return to the UK to raise her child but did not regret her decision to join ISIL. In the debate that followed, the UK Home Office announced it would revoke her UK citizenship, while Bangladesh did not recognize her as a citizen.


title: Bethnal Green trio

text: As of November 11, 2022, Ms. Begum is being held in a detention camp in the northeastern part of Syria near her imprisoned husband. Samantha Knights KC, the lawyer for Begum, stated Begum was a victim of sex trafficking lured by Islamic state propaganda. Sir James Eadie KC of the Home Office stated Begum is a threat to national security with an MI5 agent reporting it was inconceivable that Begum did not know Isil was a terrorist organization due to the number of terror attacks and public beheadings being posted in the news at the time they left Britain.


title: Description

text: Description is the pattern of narrative development that aims to make vivid a place, object, character, or group. Description is one of four rhetorical modes (also known as "modes of discourse"), along with exposition, argumentation, and narration. In practice it would be difficult to write literature that drew on just one of the four basic modes.


title: Description

text: Fiction-writing also has modes: action, exposition, description, dialogue, summary, and transition. Author Peter Selgin refers to "methods", including action, dialogue, thoughts, summary, scenes, and description. Currently, there is no consensus within the writing community regarding the number and composition of fiction-writing modes and their uses.


title: Description

text: Description is the fiction-writing mode for transmitting a mental image of the particulars of a story. Together with dialogue, narration, exposition, and summarization, description is one of the most widely recognized of the fiction-writing modes. As stated in "Writing from A to Z", edited by Kirk Polking, description is more than the amassing of details; it is bringing something to life by carefully choosing and arranging words and phrases to produce the desired effect. The most appropriate and effective techniques for presenting description are a matter of ongoing discussion among writers and writing coaches.


title: Description

text: A purple patch is an over-written passage in which the writer has strained too hard to achieve an impressive effect, by elaborate figures or other means. The phrase (Latin: "purpureus pannus") was first used by the Roman poet Horace in his "Ars Poetica" (c. 20 BC) to denote an irrelevant and excessively ornate passage; the sense of irrelevance is normally absent in modern usage, although such passages are usually incongruous. By extension, purple prose is lavishly figurative, rhythmic, or otherwise overwrought.


title: Description

text: In philosophy, the nature of description has been an important question since Bertrand Russell's classical texts.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: The NASA Astronaut Corps is a unit of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that selects, trains, and provides astronauts as crew members for U.S. and international space missions. It is based at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: The first U.S. astronaut candidates were selected by NASA in 1959, for its Project Mercury with the objective of orbiting astronauts around the Earth in single-man capsules. The military services were asked to provide a list of military test pilots who met specific qualifications. After stringent screening, NASA announced its selection of the "Mercury Seven" as its first astronauts. Since then, NASA has selected 22 more groups of astronauts, opening the corps to civilians, scientists, doctors, engineers, and school teachers. As of the 2009 Astronaut Class, 61% of the astronauts selected by NASA have come from military service.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: NASA selects candidates from a diverse pool of applicants with a wide variety of backgrounds. From the thousands of applications received, only a few are chosen for the intensive Astronaut Candidate training program. Including the "Original Seven", 339 candidates have been selected to date.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: The Astronaut Corps is based at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, although members may be assigned to other locations based on mission requirements, e.g. Soyuz training at Star City, Russia.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: The Chief of the Astronaut Office is the most senior leadership position for active astronauts in the Corps. The Chief Astronaut serves as head of the Corps and is the principal adviser to the NASA Administrator on astronaut training and operations. The first Chief Astronaut was Deke Slayton, appointed in 1962. The current Chief Astronaut is Gregory R. Wiseman.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: Salaries for newly hired civilian astronauts are based on the federal government's General Schedule pay scale for grades GS-11 through GS-14. The astronaut's grade is based on his or her academic achievements and experience. Astronauts can be promoted up to grade GS-15. As of 2015, astronauts based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, earn between $66,026 (GS-11 step 1) and $158,700 (GS-15 step 8 and above).


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: Military astronauts are detailed to the Johnson Space Center and remain on active duty for pay, benefits, leave, and similar military matters.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: There are no age restrictions for the NASA Astronaut Corps. Astronaut candidates have ranged between the ages of 26 and 46, with the average age being 34. Candidates must be U.S. citizens to apply for the program.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: Candidates must have a master's degree from an accredited institution in engineering, biological science, physical science or mathematics. The degree must be followed by at least two to three years of related, progressively responsible, professional experience (graduate work or studies) or at least 1,000 hours of pilot-in-command time in jet aircraft. An advanced degree is desirable and may be substituted for experience, such as a doctoral degree (which counts as the two years experience). Teaching experience, including experience at the K – 12 levels, is considered to be qualifying experience.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: Candidates must have the ability to pass the NASA long-duration space flight physical, which includes the following specific requirements:


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: , the corps has 42 "active" astronauts consisting of 16 women and 26 men or 38.1% female and 61.9% male The highest number of active astronauts at one time was in 2000 when there were 149. All of the current astronaut corps are from the classes of 1996 (Group 16) or later.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: There are currently 19 "international active astronauts", "who are assigned to duties at the Johnson Space Center", who were selected by their home agency to train as part of a NASA Astronaut Group and serve alongside their NASA counterparts. While the international astronauts, Payload Specialists, and Spaceflight Participants go through training with the NASA Astronaut Corps, they are not considered members of the corps.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: , the corps has 16 "management" astronauts, who remain NASA employees but are no longer eligible for flight assignment. The current management astronauts are assigned to NASA operations as follows: Ames Research Center (one astronaut); Goddard Space Flight Center (one); Johnson Space Center (ten); Langley Research Center (one); and NASA Headquarters (three). The current management astronauts includes personnel chosen to join the corps as early as 1985 (Group 11, Associate Administrator Robert D. Cabana) and as recently as 2009 (Group 20, Serena Auñón-Chancellor of medical and CAPCOM branches).


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: The term "Astronaut Candidate" (informally "ASCAN") refers to individuals who have been selected by NASA as candidates for the NASA Astronaut Corps and are currently undergoing a candidacy training program at the Johnson Space Center. The most recent class of Astronaut Candidates was selected in 2021.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: Only three Astronaut Candidates have resigned before completing training: Brian O'Leary and Anthony Llewellyn, both from the 1967 Selection Group, and Robb Kulin of the 2017 group. O'Leary resigned in April 1968 after additional Apollo missions were cancelled, Llewellyn resigned in August 1968 after failing to qualify as a jet pilot, and Kulin resigned in August 2018 for unspecified personal reasons.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: Selection as an Astronaut Candidate and subsequent promotion to Astronaut does not guarantee the individual will eventually fly in space. Some have voluntarily resigned or been medically disqualified after becoming astronauts but before being selected for flights.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: Civilian candidates are expected to remain with the Corps for at least five years after initial training; military candidates are assigned for specific tours. After these time limits, members of the Astronaut Corps may resign or retire at any time.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: Three members of the Astronaut Corps (Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger B. Chaffee) were killed during a ground test accident while preparing for the Apollo 1 mission. Eleven were killed during spaceflight, on Space Shuttle missions STS-51-L and STS-107. Another four (Elliot See, Charles Bassett, Theodore Freeman, and Clifton Williams) were killed in T-38 plane crashes during training for space flight during the Gemini and Apollo programs. Another was killed in a 1967 automobile accident, and another died in a 1991 commercial airliner crash while traveling on NASA business.


title: NASA Astronaut Corps

text: Two members of the Corps have been involuntarily dismissed: Lisa Nowak and William Oefelein. Both were returned to service with the US Navy.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: MLS Cup 2021 was the 26th edition of the MLS Cup, the championship match of Major League Soccer (MLS) at the conclusion of the 2021 MLS Cup Playoffs. The soccer match was played on December 11, 2021, at Providence Park in Portland, Oregon, United States. It was contested by hosts Portland Timbers and New York City FC to determine the champion of the 2021 season.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: New York City FC won their first MLS Cup title by defeating the Timbers in a penalty shootout following a 1–1 draw in regulation and extra time. NYCFC goalkeeper Sean Johnson was named the match's most valuable player (MVP) for his performance in the shootout, which included two saves. The match was broadcast by ABC and drew an audience of 1.14 million viewers in the United States.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: The MLS Cup is the post-season championship of Major League Soccer (MLS), a professional club soccer league in the United States and Canada. The 2021 season was the 26th in MLS history, and was contested by 27 teams organized into the eastern and western conferences. Each team played 34 matches during the regular season from April to early November, primarily against intra-conference opponents with the schedule varying based on conference to minimize travel due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The playoffs, running from November to early December, were contested between the top seven clubs in each conference through four rounds. Each round had a single-elimination match hosted by the higher-seeded team; the top team in each conference was also given a bye to the Conference Semifinals.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: The finalists, the Portland Timbers and New York City FC (NYCFC), both finished as the fourth seed in the western and eastern conferences, respectively. The Timbers finished with four more points and were named hosts for the MLS Cup final. Portland previously won the MLS Cup in the 2015 final and lost in the 2018 final, while NYCFC had never advanced to a previous final. The two clubs did not play each other in the regular season and last met in the 2020 MLS is Back Tournament quarterfinals, where the Timbers won 3–1. It was the seventh consecutive season where the Western Conference champion was either Portland or their rivals Seattle Sounders FC, who have won the cup twice.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: The Portland Timbers had previously won the MLS Cup in 2015 and finished as runners-up in 2018 under new manager Giovanni Savarese. During the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, the club finished as champions of the MLS is Back Tournament in Florida and third in the Western Conference, but were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by FC Dallas in a penalty shootout. During the 2020–21 offseason, the Timbers traded away two of their left backs, Jorge Villafaña and Marco Farfan, and acquired wingbacks Claudio Bravo and Josecarlos Van Rankin as replacements. The club also signed Chilean striker Felipe Mora to a permanent contract after his one-year loan from Pumas UNAM expired. Portland were expected to rely heavily on their veteran midfield trio of Diego Chará, Diego Valeri, and Sebastián Blanco (who was injured for most of the 2020 season).


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: Portland started the season with three wins and four losses in their first seven matches, earning nine points and holding seventh place in the Western Conference by June. The Timbers also played in the CONCACAF Champions League, having qualified through the MLS is Back Tournament, and were eliminated in the quarterfinals by Club América in early May. The inconsistent performances were blamed in part on the loss of several key players to injuries, including winger Andy Polo, starting goalkeepers Jeff Attinella and Steve Clark, backup goalkeeper Aljaz Ivacic, and midfielder Diego Chará. By the end of May, ten of their players were listed as injured or otherwise unable to play.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: Following an early June break in league play for the 2021 CONCACAF Gold Cup, the Timbers were able to earn a win against Sporting Kansas City and a comeback draw with the Houston Dynamo to reach fifth in the conference. Savarese used different formations in each match to rotate players, switching from a 4–2–3–1 against Kansas City to a 5–2–3 for Houston and a subsequent match against Minnesota United FC that ended in a loss. Portland dropped below the playoffs cutoff to eighth place in the west following road losses to Austin FC, Minnesota, and the LA Galaxy in July; the club had, however, won their two home matches against FC Dallas and Los Angeles FC.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: During the summer transfer window, Portland signed midfielders George Fochive as a replacement for Polo and Santiago Moreno as a Young Designated Player; the club also traded Jeremy Ebobisse to the San Jose Earthquakes, a move that opened a starting role for striker Felipe Mora. The Timbers re-entered playoff contention in early August by tying San Jose Earthquakes and defeating Real Salt Lake to begin a three-match homestand, which finished with a 6–2 loss to rivals Seattle Sounders FC. Several prominent players began to return from injuries, including Sebastián Blanco, striker Jarosław Niezgoda, defender Larrys Mabiala, and goalkeeper Steve Clark, but the team remained shorthanded and began a stretch of five away matches by drawing against Austin and losing to Kansas City.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: After dropping to ninth place in the west, the Timbers closed out August with a 2–0 win against the Sounders in the middle of five consecutive road matches, but lost midfielder Eryk Williamson for the rest of the season due to an ACL tear. The match was the first of an eight-game undefeated streak (including seven wins) that lasted through September and allowed them to rise up to fourth place in the conference. The streak was snapped by a loss to the LA Galaxy that was followed by two more losses to Vancouver Whitecaps FC and the Colorado Rapids, but Portland remained in fourth place. The Timbers clinched a playoff berth in their last match of October, winning 2–0 against San Jose, and finished the season by defeating Real Salt Lake and Austin FC. Portland finished the 2021 regular season with 55 points and 17 wins, setting a club record for their time in MLS, and earned the fourth playoffs seed in the Western Conference.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: Portland began their playoffs run with a 3–1 victory at home against fifth-place Minnesota United FC, breaking a seven-match winless streak against the visitors, in the first round. Franco Fragapane scored the opening goal for Minnesota with a sliding shot in the 11th minute, but Larrys Mabiala's header shortly before half-time tied the match. The Timbers took the lead in the 48th minute with a strike from Blanco, who had been treated for an injury before half-time and went on to score his second goal in the 67th minute with a shot. Portland advanced to the Conference Semifinals, hosted by the top-seeded Colorado Rapids on Thanksgiving, and won 1–0 with a Mabiala goal in the 90th minute amid a scramble in the penalty area. The team, however, lost Blanco to an injury in the 50th minute and would be without Dairon Asprilla, who was suspended for earning a red card in stoppage time.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: The Timbers hosted seventh-place Real Salt Lake, who had produced two upsets in the 2021 playoffs, in a rematch of the 2013 Western Conference Final. Portland took the lead in the fifth minute through a shot by Felipe Mora, who redirected a mishit clearance from RSL defender Aaron Herrera in the penalty area. Santiago Moreno then extended the lead in the 61st minute, scoring his first MLS goal with a strike from that hit the post and was deflected off goalkeeper David Ochoa into the goal. The Timbers advanced to the MLS Cup final with their 2–0 victory, breaking a winless streak against RSL in playoff matches.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: New York City FC entered the league as an expansion team in 2015 and qualified for the playoffs in six consecutive seasons beginning in 2016. The team reached the Conference Semifinals five times, but had never advanced beyond that stage. The 2020 season, their first under new manager Ronny Deila, ended with a fifth-place finish in the Eastern Conference and a first round exit from the playoffs in a penalty shootout against Orlando City SC.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: During the offseason, City traded away former captain Alexander Ring and defender Rónald Matarrita to other MLS clubs and signed several young players in their place. Among them were midfielder Alfredo Morales, winger Thiago Andrade, and left backs Malte Amundsen and Chris Gloster to replace Matarrita. The 2021 season also saw the return of attacking midfielder Maximiliano Moralez, one of two Designated Players on the team, who missed most of the 2020 season due to multiple injuries. Unlike its early seasons where the team relied on veteran players from European leagues, NYCFC had instead opted to invest in younger talent from South America scouted from smaller leagues.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: NYCFC started the season with the best goal differential in the Eastern Conference but went winless for three weeks in May and entered the June break in fourth place. The team were then without goalkeeper Sean Johnson and James Sands during the Gold Cup, as well as new signing Talles Magno due to an injury, as they entered a stretch of 10 matches in 36 days beginning in mid-July. The team reached second in the East by early August, but later went on a stretch of 10 matches with only one victory.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: NYCFC finished fourth in the East and began their 2021 playoffs run by defeating Atlanta United FC 2–0 in the first round at home, scoring twice within four minutes in the second half. NYCFC advanced to play Supporters' Shield champions New England Revolution in the Conference Semifinals at Gillette Stadium, where they drew 2–2 after extra time despite leading goalscorer Valentín Castellanos being sent off by earning a second yellow card. New York City earned an upset victory by winning the ensuing penalty shootout 5–3 after Adam Buksa's shot was saved by Sean Johnson.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: Their Eastern Conference Final opponents, the Philadelphia Union, were unable to field a full roster due to the absence of 11 players—including several starters—required to quarantine under the league's COVID protocols. New York City FC won 2–1 against the Union, conceding first but equalizing within 90 seconds and going on to score a match-winning goal in the 87th minute.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: Providence Park in Portland, Oregon, the home venue of the Portland Timbers, hosted the MLS Cup final for the first time in its history. It was built as a multi-purpose venue in 1926 and renovated in 2011 into a soccer-specific stadium for the Timbers' MLS debut; following an expansion completed in 2019, Providence Park holds 25,218 spectators. Prior to its renovations, the stadium had hosted the 1977 Soccer Bowl, the championship game of the original North American Soccer League, and several matches during the 1999 and 2003 editions of the FIFA Women's World Cup. The 2015 and 2018 NWSL Championships were also played at Providence Park, along with the 2021 NWSL Challenge Cup Championship.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: Tickets went on sale on December 7, beginning with season ticket holders who had renewed for the 2022 season and followed by other season ticket holders and the general public. The match was declared sold out within 20 minutes of the first release, with only general admission seating left available, amid an Amazon Web Services outage that affected SeatGeek, the league's ticket vendor. The Timbers Army, the club's largest supporters group, distributed 1,000 priority entry wristbrands for the general admission section the day before the MLS Cup final; a line began forming outside Providence Park several days before. By December 11, ticket prices on secondary and resale markets ranged from $550 to $2,500, with an average of $779.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: NYCFC were allocated five sections for away supporters as part of the league's distribution of tickets; the club announced plans to subsidize some tickets, pricing them at $10. The club also hosted an official viewing party for the MLS Cup final at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: The match was broadcast in the United States on ABC in English and UniMás and TUDN in Spanish. The Canadian broadcast was carried on TSN in English and TVA Sports in French. The ABC broadcast featured Jon Champion as the play-by-play announcer and Taylor Twellman as color commentator, along with Sam Borden as sideline reporter and Mark Clattenburg as rules analyst. It was filmed with 28 cameras, including nine fixed cameras, four goalpost cameras, and a skycam above the pitch. The UniMás broadcast featured commentary from Luis Omar Tapia, Diego Balado, Ramses Sandoval, and Daniel Nohra. The match was also broadcast internationally in 200 countries, including on ESPN International in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Oceania. The national anthem was performed before the match by Portugal. The Man, a Portland-based alternative rock band.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: The ABC broadcast was watched by an average of 1.14 million viewers, peaking at 1.63 million during the penalty shootout. It was slightly higher than the Fox broadcast for MLS Cup 2020 and 38 percent higher than the MLS Cup 2019 broadcast on ABC, but lower than the Thanksgiving playoff match featuring Colorado and Portland. The top viewing markets included Portland, where the match garnered a 11.7 rating, Greenville, South Carolina, Seattle, and New York City. The UniMás and TUDN broadcast in Spanish drew 354,000 viewers.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: The final began at 12:23 p.m. at Providence Park, in front of a sold-out crowd of 25,218 spectators. The official match ball for the 2022 season was used in the match, making an early debut. Valentín Castellanos opened the scoring for NYCFC in the 41st minute through a header off a free kick that slipped through the gloves of goalkeeper Steve Clark. During the goal celebration, Jesús Medina was hit in the face by one of two beer cans thrown from the stands, resulting in a brief pause in the match. The Timbers equalized in the fourth minute of stoppage time, the latest regulation-time goal in MLS Cup history, as Felipe Mora struck from within the penalty area off a rebounded ball. The match remained tied after extra time and proceeded into a penalty shootout, which NYCFC won 4–2 in five rounds. Goalkeeper Sean Johnson (named the match's MVP) made two saves on penalties attempted by Mora and Diego Valeri in the early rounds, while Alexander Callens scored the last kick in the fifth round.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: NYCFC became the fourteenth team to win the MLS Cup and the first from the New York City area. They also became the fourth City Football Group team to win a national championship in 2021. It was the first top-flight soccer championship for the region since the New York Cosmos won the 1982 Soccer Bowl; the cross-town New York Red Bulls had played in MLS Cup 2008, but lost to the Columbus Crew. The title was also the first for any of the city's major professional sports team since the New York Giants won Super Bowl XLVI in 2012. As MLS Cup champions, NYCFC qualified for the 2022 CONCACAF Champions League, where they were eliminated in the semifinals by Seattle Sounders FC.


title: MLS Cup 2021

text: A ceremony at New York City Hall with attendance limited to 1,000 people was held on December 14 to celebrate NYCFC's MLS Cup title. Mayor Bill de Blasio awarded keys to the city to members of the team. The traditional ticker tape parade, offered to any local sports team that wins a national title, was declined by NYCFC due to "the team's capacity". The championship banner at Yankee Stadium was raised at their 2022 home opener and was ridiculed due to its small size.


title: Melanie Chartoff

text: Melanie Barbara Chartoff (born December 15, 1948) is an American actress and comedian. She first became famous for her comedy work on the ABC series "Fridays" (1980–82), and in the 1990s Fox sitcom "Parker Lewis Can't Lose". She voiced both Didi Pickles and Grandma Minka, Didi's mother on the Nickelodeon animated series "Rugrats" and "All Grown Up!".


title: Melanie Chartoff

text: Chartoff was born on December 15, 1948, in New Haven, Connecticut, and attended West Haven High School. She went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts from Adelphi University. She is Jewish.


title: Melanie Chartoff

text: Her first Broadway appearances were in Galt MacDermot's space opera "Via Galactica" (1972), directed by Peter Hall, and The Young Vic's "Scapino", starring Jim Dale (1974).


title: Melanie Chartoff

text: Chartoff's first TV role came in 1976 when she played a nurse on "Search For Tomorrow", after which appeared in the 1978 motion picture "American Hot Wax". She first became a nationally known figure on ABC's "Fridays", which was ABC's attempt to create its own version of "Saturday Night Live". She immediately stood out on the series, partly thanks to her regular role as the anchor on the show's fake newscasts, but also due to her comedic skills (particularly an impression of Nancy Reagan). On one sketch, she was cold-cocked on live TV when co-star Maryedith Burrell failed to pull her punch during a skit and chipped Chartoff's tooth.


title: Melanie Chartoff

text: Between the demise of "Fridays" in 1982 and her return to a regular series in 1990 with "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" (in which she co-starred for three seasons as the high-strung Principal Grace Musso), Chartoff continued to work steadily on television throughout the 1980s, including appearances on "Mr. Belvedere", "Wiseguy", and "St. Elsewhere", as well as a recurring role on "Newhart" as Dr. Kaiser. She made two appearances on "Seinfeld", including one in the 1998 series finale in which four of her former "Fridays" co-stars were also involved (including Michael Richards). She appeared in the 2006 season finale of "Desperate Housewives".


title: Melanie Chartoff

text: In the Los Angeles premiere of Bill Finn and James Lapine's musical "March of the Falsettos" (1982), for which she won a Drama-Logue Award, she played Trina. She played Mary Jane Wilkes in the La Jolla Playhouse premiere of "Big River" (1984). At South Coast Repertory she appeared in the world Premiere of "On the Jump". She played Dot in the West Coast premiere of "Sunday in the Park with George" at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater (1986).


title: Melanie Chartoff

text: In 1991, Chartoff and fellow voice actor Michael Bell conceived the Grayway Rotating Drain, a graywater recycling device for reuse of shower and sink water in the home. The following year, they finished and patented the product with the help of Ronald K. Ford.


title: Melanie Chartoff

text: Chartoff's first voice-over work was a guest role on "Challenge of the Super Friends". She has continued her work as an in-demand voice actress and also takes occasional TV and stage roles. She works as a coach to both actors and non-actors to make them more charismatic in public performances. In 2005, she interviewed Laraine Newman for "Autograph Collector" magazine. She writes for "The Huffington Post", "The Jewish Journal", "Defenestration Magazine", and "The Funny Times". She performs her original material at such Los Angeles venues as Comedy Central's "Sit n' Spin," "Tasty Words," and "I Love a Good Story."


title: Melanie Chartoff

text: From 1991 to 2008, Chartoff voiced Didi Pickles and Grandma Minka, Didi's mother on Nickelodeon's hit series "Rugrats", for which she won a Daytime Emmy. She continued to voice Didi on the "Rugrats" spin-off series, "All Grown Up!". For the 2021 revival series of the same name, Chartoff was replaced by actress Ashley Spillers, who currently voices Didi Pickles.


title: Melanie Chartoff

text: Aside from Drama-Logue and Daytime Emmy Awards, she was cited by the City of Hope for creating and producing the yearly event Halloween for Hope to benefit children's cancer research and received a Certificate of Appreciation from the Mayor of Los Angeles for her concerts for the homeless. She is listed in Who's Who in California, and Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: Baumol's cost disease, also known as the Baumol effect, is the rise of wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher productivity growth. The phenomenon was described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s and is an example of cross elasticity of demand.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains derives from the requirement to compete for workers with jobs that have experienced productivity gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts. For instance, if the retail sector pays its managers 19th-century-style wages, retail managers may decide to quit to get jobs in the automobile sector, where wages are higher because of higher labor productivity. Thus, retail managers' salaries increase not due to labor productivity increases in the retail sector but due to productivity and corresponding wage increases in other industries. These higher labor costs in the retail sector, despite little increase in productivity, are an example of Baumol's cost disease.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: Increases in labor productivity tend to result in higher wages. Productivity growth is not uniform across the economy, however. Some sectors experience high productivity growth while others experience little or negative productivity growth. Yet wages have tended to rise not only in sectors with high productivity growth but also in those with little to no productivity growth.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: The American economists William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen proposed that wages in sectors with stagnant productivity rise out of the need to compete for workers with sectors that experience higher productivity growth, which can afford to raise wages without raising prices. With higher labor costs, but little increase in productivity, sectors with low productivity growth see their costs of production rise. As summarized by Baumol in a 1967 paper:


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: If productivity per man hour rises cumulatively in one sector relative to its rate of growth elsewhere in the economy, while wages rise commensurately in all areas, then relative costs in the nonprogressive sectors must inevitably rise, and these costs will rise cumulatively and without limit...Thus, the very progress of the technologically progressive sectors inevitably adds to the costs of the technologically unchanging sectors of the economy, unless somehow the labor markets in these areas can be sealed off and wages held absolutely constant, a most unlikely possibility.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: The original study inspiring the concept of Baumol's cost disease was conducted for the performing arts sector. American economists William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen pointed out that the same number of musicians is needed to play a Beethoven string quartet today as was needed in the 19th century—in other words, the productivity of classical music performance has not increased. However, the real wages of musicians have increased substantially since the 19th century.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: Let us suppose, for example, that in the greater part of employments the productive powers of labour had been improved to tenfold, or that a day's labour could produce ten times the quantity of work which it had done originally; but that in a particular employment they had been improved only to double, or that a day's labour could produce only twice the quantity of work which it had done before. In exchanging the produce of a day's labour in the greater part of employments for that of a day's labour in this particular one, ten times the original quantity of work in them would purchase only twice the original quantity in it. Any particular quantity in it, therefore, a pound weight, for example, would appear to be five times dearer than before. In reality, however, it would be twice as cheap.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: Firms may respond to increases in labor costs induced by the Baumol effect in a variety of ways, including:


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: A 2008 study by American economist William Nordhaus showed as much, concluding that "Baumol-type diseases" in technologically stagnant sectors have led to "rising relative prices and declining relative real outputs". In the realm of prices, Nordhaus showed that in the United States from 1948–2001 "productivity trends are associated almost percentage-point for percentage-point with price decline". Industries with low productivity growth thus saw their relative prices increase, leading Nordhaus to conclude: "The hypothesis of a cost-price disease due to slow productivity growth is strongly supported by the historical data. Industries with relatively lower productivity growth show a percentage-point


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: for percentage-point higher growth in relative prices." A similar conclusion held for real output: "The real output/stagnation hypothesis is


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: strongly confirmed. Technologically stagnant industries have shown slower growth in real output than have the technologically dynamic ones. A one percentage-point higher productivity growth was associated with a three-quarters percentage-point higher real output growth."


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: An important implication of Baumol's cost disease is that it should be expected that, in a world with technological progress, the costs of manufactured goods will tend to fall (as productivity in manufacturing continually increases) while the costs of labor-intensive services like education, legal services, and health care (where productivity growth is persistently slow) will tend to rise (see chart).


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: While Baumol's cost disease suggests that costs in low-productivity-growth industries will continually rise, Baumol argues the "stagnant-sector services will never become unaffordable to society. This is because the economy's constantly growing productivity simultaneously increases the community's overall purchasing power." To see this, consider an economy with a real national income of $100 billion with healthcare spending amounting to $20 billion (20%), leaving $80 billion for other purchases. Say that, over 50 years, due to productivity growth real national income doubles to $200 billion (an annual growth rate of about 1.4%). To end up with the same amount of income left over after healthcare spending as 50 years prior, healthcare spending would have to rise by 500%, to $120 billion. In this situation, healthcare would no longer take up 20% of national income but fully 60%. If healthcare costs were to rise to anything less than 60% of national income, there would be "more" money left over for other purchases (for instance, if healthcare costs were to rise from 20% of national income to 40% of national income, there would be $120 billion left over for other purchases—40% more than 50 years prior). So it can be seen that even if productivity growth were to lead to substantial healthcare cost increases through Baumol's cost disease, the wealth increase brought on by that productivity growth would still leave society able to purchase more goods than before.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: Baumol's cost disease has major implications for government spending. Since most government spending goes towards services that are subject to the cost disease—law enforcement, education, healthcare etc.—the cost to the government of providing these services will rise as time goes on.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: One implication of the Baumol effect is a shift in the distribution of the labor force from high-productivity industries to low-productivity industries. In other words, the cost disease suggests that the share of the workforce employed in low-productivity industries will rise over time.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: The reason for this can be seen through a thought experiment offered by Baumol in his book "The Cost Disease":


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: As predicted by the Baumol effect, the proportion of the United States labor force employed in stagnant industries has grown substantially since the 1960s. In particular, the United States has morphed from a manufacturing economy into a service economy (see chart). However, how much of this is due to the Baumol effect rather than other causes is disputed. In a 2010 study, the economist Talan B. İşcan devised a model from which he concluded that both Baumol and Engel effects played significant roles in the rising share of employment in services in the United States (though he noted that "considerable gaps between the calibrated model and the actual data remain"). An older 1968 study by economist Victor Fuchs likewise concluded that the Baumol effect played a major role in the shift to services, although he determined that demand shifts like those proposed in Engel's law played only a minor role. The economists Robert Rowthorn and Ramana Ramaswamy also concluded that relatively faster growth of productivity in manufacturing played a role in the shift to services. The economist Tom Elfring, however, argued in a 1989 paper that the Baumol effect has played a secondary role to growth in demand for services since the 1970s. Alternative theories for the shift to services include demand-side theories (the Baumol effect is broadly a supply-side explanation) like the three-sector model devised by Allan Fisher and Colin Clark in the 1930s, which posit that services satisfy higher needs than goods and so as income grows a higher share of income will be used for the purchase of services; changes in the inter-industry division of labor, favoring specialized service activities; outsourcing to countries with lower labor costs; increasing participation of women in the labor force; and trade specialization.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: The Baumol effect has also been used to describe the reallocation of labor out of agriculture (in 1930, 21.5% of the workforce was employed in agriculture and agriculture made up 7.7% of GDP; by 2000, only 1.9% of the workforce was employed in agriculture and agriculture made up only 0.7% of GDP). In a 2009 study, the economists Benjamin N. Dennis and Talan B. İşcan concluded that after the 1950s relatively faster productivity growth in agriculture was the key driver behind the continuing shift in employment from agriculture to non-farm goods (prior to the 1950s, they determined that Engel's law explained almost all labor reallocation out of agriculture).


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: In his original paper on the cost disease, Baumol argued that in the long run the cost disease implies a reduction in aggregate productivity growth and correspondingly a reduction in economic growth. This follows straightforwardly from the labor distribution effects of the cost disease. As a larger and larger share of the workforce moves from high-productivity-growth industries to low-productivity-growth industries, it is natural to expect that the overall rate of productivity growth will slow. Since economic growth is driven in large part by productivity growth, economic growth would also slow.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: The economist Nicholas Oulton, however, argued in a 2001 paper that Baumol's cost disease may counterintuitively result in an "increase" in aggregate productivity growth. This could occur if many services produce intermediate inputs for the manufacturing sector, i.e. if a significant number of services are business services. In this case, even though the slow-growth service sector is increasing in size, because these services further boost the productivity growth of the shrinking manufacturing sector overall productivity growth may actually increase. Relatedly, the economist Maurizio Pugno described how many stagnant services, like education and healthcare, contribute to human capital formation, which enhances growth and thus "oppos[es] the negative Baumol effect on growth".


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: The economist Hiroaki Sasaki, however, disputed Oulton's argument in a 2007 paper. Sasaki constructed an economic model that takes into account the use of services as intermediate inputs in high-productivity-growth industries and still concluded that a shift in labor force distribution from higher-productivity-growth manufacturing to lower-productivity-growth services decreases the rate of economic growth in the long run. Likewise, the economists Jochen Hartwig and concluded in a 2019 paper that, while Outlon's theory is "logically consistent", it is "not in line with the data", which shows a lowering of aggregate productivity growth.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: The Baumol effect has been applied to the education sector, including by Baumol himself. By most measures, productivity growth in the education sector over the last several decades has been low or even negative; the average student-teacher ratio in American universities, for instance, was sixteen to one in 2011, just as it was in 1981. Yet, over this period, tuition costs have risen substantially. It has been proposed that this is at least partially explained by the Baumol effect: even though there has been little or even negative productivity growth in the education sector, because of productivity increases across other sectors of the economy universities today would not be able to attract professors with 1980s-level salaries, so they are forced to raise wages to maintain their workforce. To afford the increased labor costs, universities raise tuition (i.e. they increase prices).


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: Evidence on the role of the Baumol effect in rising education costs has been mixed. Economists Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman, both of the College of William & Mary, argued in a 2006 study, for instance, that the Baumol effect "is" the dominant driver behind increasing higher education costs. Other studies, however, have found a lesser role for the Baumol effect. In a 2014 study, the economists Robert E. Martin and Carter Hill devised a model that determined that the Baumol effect explained only 23%–32% of the rise in higher education costs. The economists Gary Rhoades and Joanna Frye went further in a 2015 study and argued that the Baumol effect could "not" explain rising tuition costs at all, as "relative academic labor costs have gone down as tuition has gone up". The cost disease may also have only limited effects on primary and secondary education: a 2016 study on per-pupil public education spending by Manabu Nose, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, found that "the contribution of Baumol's effect was much smaller than implied by theory"; Nose argued that it was instead rising wage premiums paid for teachers in excess of market wages that were the dominant reason for increasing costs, particularly in developing countries.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: Alternative explanations for rising higher education costs include Bowen's revenue theory of cost, reduced public subsidies for education, administrative bloat, the commercialization of higher education, increased demand for higher education, the easy availability of federal student loans, difficulty comparing prices of different universities, technological change, and lack of a central mechanism to control price increases.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: The Baumol effect has been applied to the rising cost of healthcare, as the healthcare industry has long had low productivity growth. Empirical studies have largely confirmed the large role of Baumol's cost disease in the rising cost of healthcare in the United States, although there is some disagreement. Likewise, a 2021 study determined that "Baumol's cost disease ha[s] a significant positive impact on health expenditure growth" in China. However, a paper by economists Bradley Rossen and Akhter Faroque on healthcare costs in Canada found that "the cost disease...is a relatively minor contributor [in the growth of health-care spending in Canada], while technical progress in health care and growth in per capita incomes are by far the biggest contributors".


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: Despite substantial technological innovation and capital investment, the healthcare industry has struggled to significantly increase productivity. As summarized by the economists Alberto Marino, David Morgan, Luca Lorenzoni, and Chris James:


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: Baumol's cost disease is often used to describe consequences of the lack of growth in productivity in the quaternary sector of the economy and public services, such as public hospitals and state colleges. Labor-intensive sectors that rely heavily on non-routine human interaction or activities, such as health care, education, or the performing arts, have had less growth in productivity over time. As with the string quartet example, it takes nurses the same amount of time to change a bandage or college professors the same amount of time to mark an essay today as it did in 1966, as those types of activities rely on the movements of the human body, which cannot yet be engineered to perform more quickly, accurately, or efficiently in the same way that a machine, such as a computer, have. In contrast, goods-producing industries, such as the car manufacturing sector and other activities that involve routine tasks, workers are continually becoming more productive by technological innovations to their tools and equipment.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: The reported productivity gains of the service industry in the late 1990s are largely attributable to total factor productivity. Providers decreased the cost of ancillary labor through outsourcing or technology. Examples include offshoring data entry and bookkeeping for health care providers and replacing manually-marked essays in educational assessment with multiple choice tests that can be automatically marked.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: In the 1967 paper "Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth: The Anatomy of Urban Crisis", Baumol introduced a simple two-sector model to demonstrate the cost disease. To do so, he imagined an economy consisting of only two sectors: sector one, which has constant productivity (that is, the number of goods workers can produce per man hour does not change as time goes on), and sector two, which sees productivity grow at a constant compounded rate formula_1 (that is, the number of goods workers can produce per man hour grows at a rate formula_2, where formula_3 is time). To simplify, he assumed that the quantity of goods produced by these two sectors (the "output" of each of the two sectors) is directly proportional to the quantity of labor employed (that is, doubling the number of workers doubles the output, tripling the number of workers triples the output, and so on) and that output depends only upon labor productivity and the quantity of labor. Since there is no increase in labor productivity in sector one, the output of sector one at time formula_3 (denoted formula_5) is:


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: where formula_7 is the quantity of labor employed in sector one and formula_8 is a constant that can be thought of as the amount of output each worker can produce at time formula_9. This equation simply says that the amount of output sector one produces equals the number of workers in sector one multiplied by the number of goods each worker can produce. Since productivity does not increase, the number of goods each worker produces remains formula_8 and output remains constant through time.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: Since the labor productivity of sector two increases at a constant compounded rate formula_1, the output of sector two at time formula_3 (denoted formula_13) is:


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: where formula_15 is the quantity of labor employed in sector two and formula_16 is a constant that can be thought of as the amount of output each worker can produce at time formula_9. Since productivity grows at a constant compounded rate formula_1, the number of goods each worker produces at time formula_3 equals formula_20, and the output of sector two grows at a rate proportional to productivity growth.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: To more clearly demonstrate how wages and costs change through time, wages in both sectors are originally set at the same value formula_21. It is then assumed that wages rise in direct proportion to productivity (i.e., a doubling of productivity results in a doubling of wages, a tripling of productivity results in a tripling of wages, and so on). This means that the wages of the two sectors at time formula_3 determined solely by productivity are:


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: These values, however, assume that workers do not move between the two sectors. If workers are equally capable of working in either sector, and they choose which sector to work in based upon which offers a higher wage, then they will always choose to work in the sector that offers the higher wage. This means that if sector one were to keep wages fixed at formula_21, then as wages in sector two grow with productivity workers in sector one would quit and seek jobs in sector two. Firms in sector one are thus forced to raise wages to attract workers. More precisely, in this model the only way firms in either sector can attract workers is to offer the same wage as firms in the other sector—if one sector were to offer lower wages, then all workers would work in the other sector.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: So to maintain their workforces, wages in the two sectors must equal each other: formula_27. And since it is sector two that sees its wage naturally rise with productivity, while sector one's does not naturally rise, it must be the case that:


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: This typifies the labor aspect of the Baumol effect: as productivity growth in one sector of the economy drives up that sector's wages, firms in sectors without productivity growth must also raise wages to compete for workers.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: From this simple model, the consequences on the costs per unit output in the two sectors can be derived. Since the only factor of production within this model is labor, each sector's total cost is the wage paid to workers multiplied by the total number of workers. The cost per unit output is the total cost divided by the amount of output, so with formula_29 representing the unit cost of goods in sector one at time formula_3 and formula_31 representing the unit cost of goods in sector two at time formula_3:


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: It can be seen that in the sector with growing labor productivity (sector two), the cost per unit output formula_31 is constant since both wages "and" output rise at the same rate. However, in the sector with stagnant labor productivity (sector one), the cost per unit output formula_29 rises exponentially since wages rise exponentially faster than output.


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: This demonstrates the cost aspect of the Baumol effect (the "cost disease"). While costs in sectors with productivity growth—and hence wage growth—need not increase, in sectors with little to no productivity growth (who nonetheless must raise wages to compete for workers) costs necessarily rise. Furthermore, if the productivity growth differential persists (that is, the low-productivity-growth sectors continue to see low productivity growth into the future while high-productivity-growth sectors continue to see high productivity growth), then costs in low-productivity-growth sectors will rise "cumulatively and without limit".


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: Baumol's model can also be used to demonstrate the effect of the cost disease on the distribution of labor. Assume that, despite the change in


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: the relative costs and prices of the two industries, the magnitude of the relative outputs of the two sectors are maintained. A situation similar to this could occur, for instance, "with the aid of government subsidy, or if demand for the product in question were sufficiently price inelastic or income elastic". The output ratio and its relation to the labor ratio, ignoring constants formula_8 and formula_16, is then given by:


title: Baumol's cost disease

text: It can be seen that as formula_3 approaches infinity, the quantity of labor in the non-progressive sector formula_50 approaches the total labor supply formula_45 while the quantity of labor in the progressive sector formula_52 approaches zero. Hence, "if the ratio of the outputs of the two sectors is held constant, more and more of the total labor force must be transferred to the non-progressive sector and the amount of labor in the other sector will tend to approach zero".


title: Abdominal hair

text: Abdominal hair is the hair that grows on the abdomen of humans and non-human mammals, in the region between the pubic area and the thorax (chest). The growth of abdominal hair follows the same pattern on nearly all mammals, vertically from the pubic area upwards and from the thorax downwards to the navel. The abdominal hair of non-human mammals is part of the pelage, (hair or fur).