BTW


Meaning of BTW in English

The FCC and personal communication systems The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released 140 megahertz of radio spectrum for use in personal communication systems in a series of rule-making procedures that began in October 1993. Licenses for these frequencies were auctioned off by the FCC between December 1994 and March 1995. David E. BorthReturn to article The FCC and cellular telephony The concept of allocating 666 paired voice channels for radiotelephone communication was officially introduced in 1968 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates telecommunications in the United States. In order to encourage competitive service within each market area, the FCC decided to create a system in which the allocated channels would be shared equally by two cellular providers. This duopoly was to consist of (1) an unregulated branch of the local telephone company (known as the wireline carrier) and (2) a nontelephone company (known as the nonwireline carrier) that would be selected on the basis of a national lottery. Thus, the first U.S. cellular system to be publicly introduced--in Chicago on Oct. 13, 1983--also introduced the dual-provider system. David E. BorthReturn to article Dylan goes electricthe event, the debate Bob Dylan's performance at the Newport (Rhode Island) Folk Festival in 1965 is widely regarded as one of the pivotal moments in the history of rock music. But, if there is near consensus on its importance, there is much less agreement on exactly what happened. Rock historians, Dylan's biographers, and eyewitnesses provide varying accounts of the audience's reaction to Dylan's performance, the reasons behind those reactions, and Dylan's response. This much is clear: when Dylan took the stage at Newport on July 25, 1965, he was the leading light of the folk music revival of the early 1960s. Based on traditional American musical forms and steeped in the populist politics of the 1930s, the revival was meshed with the ongoing civil rights movement and thrived on topical songwriting. The pursuit of authenticity lay at the heart of the revival, and as such it was generally believed that real folk music was played only on acoustic instruments. Folk purists had little respect for rock and roll, which most regarded as puerile and crassly commercial. In the months leading up to Newport, Dylan, theretofore the quintessential acoustic troubadour, had released the partly electric album Bringing It All Back Home and had recorded much of Highway 61 Revisited with rock-oriented musicians and electric instruments. The week of the 1965 festival, Dylan's acerbic single Like a Rolling Stone was omnipresent on U.S. Top 40 radio. Called electric blues by some and rock and roll by others, it was unquestionably not the folk music for which he was known. Interested in duplicating this electric sound live at Newport, Dylan hastily recruited members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (guitarist Mike Bloomfield, drummer Sam Lay, and bassist Jerome Arnold), along with session pianist Barry Goldberg and keyboardist Al Kooper, who had created the signature organ sound on Rolling Stone, to act as his backing band. They rehearsed deep into the night of July 24. Even before their set with Dylan, the Butterfield band had stirred controversy with their performance of electric blues during a festival workshop (at which Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, and the noted folklorist Alan Lomax scuffled after Lomax's disparaging introduction of the Butterfield band) and earlier on July 25 with their performance on the main stage. For his set, Dylan, brandishing a solid-body electric guitar, plugged in with the rest of the band. The set began with Maggie's Farm from Highway 61. This is where the accounts diverge. Some (notably critic and biographer Robert Shelton) reported that the audience immediately registered hostility and that boos and catcalls (Play folk music! Get rid of the band!) began at the end of Maggie's Farm and escalated through the next song, Like a Rolling Stone. Dylan biographer Anthony Scaduto described the audience's initial reaction as a mixture of scattered booing and applause but mostly bewildered silence. According to Scaduto, booing and heckling then spread throughout the audience during Rolling Stone, driving Dylan and the band offstage after the performance of a third song, an early version of It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry. Scaduto cited an interpretation of the event by folk musician Ric von Schmidt that has been echoed by others (notably biographer Bob Spitz, who also reported that some audience members booed as soon as they realized that amplified instruments were going to be used). According to von Schmidt, Dylan's voice was overwhelmed by the band as the result of poor sound mix (which most accounts describe as muddy or unbalanced at best), which led the people closest to the stage to call out that they couldn't make out Dylan's words (Can't hear ya! Turn the sound down!). The members of the audience who were farther back, said von Schmidt, misunderstood the complaints and responded with booing and jeeringprobably based on the belief that Dylan was betraying folk music by going electric. What is certain is that there was booing (and cheering) and that after three songs Dylan and the band left the stage. According to Kooper, who was at Dylan's side onstage, the performers left because they had rehearsed only three songs, and the booing was primarily a response to the brevity of the set by the performer that most of the audience had come to hear (see Kooper's biography of Dylan). There also are varying accounts of what transpired backstage during the performance, but it seems likely that a confrontation took place at the sound board between festival board members: Lomax and eminent folksinger Pete Seeger wanted to cut the electricity; Grossman and Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary) successfully opposed them. There had already been a similar confrontation during the Butterfield band's performance earlier in the day. Dylan returned to the stage with an acoustic guitar (at Yarrow's behest, according to most accounts) and was greeted by thunderous applause. He performed Mr. Tambourine Man and It's All Over Now Baby Blue, and as he did so, according to Greil Marcus in Invisible Republic, there were tears in Dylan's eyes. Scaduto, too, described the tears, and several accounts characterize Dylan as shaken and confused. Kooper, on the other hand, said there were no tears. And so the debate lives on, decades after the event. But what no one denies is that folk and rock music were never the same after that memorable day at Newport in 1965. World Culture and the Olympic Games Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles. The goal of Olympism is to place everywhere sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to encouraging the establishment of a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity. The Olympic Charter, Fundamental Principles For more than 100 years the Olympic Movement has conceived of itself as promoting culture, human development, international education, and peace through sport. Founded mainly by writers, educators, scientists, and scholars, the Olympic Movement's understanding of culture has shifted over the years among the fine-arts conception, the idea of general moral cultivation, and the anthropological understanding of total and distinctive ways of life. What hasn't changed is the commitment, in the words of the 1995 charter, to symbolizing the universality and the diversity of human cultures through the Olympic Games, thereby serving intercultural understanding and dtente. Public recognition that this organizational ideology of Olympism even exists, much less that Olympic sport is officially regarded as only a means to much larger intercultural ends, varies greatly from country to country and community to community. In the United States, for example, the mass media treat the Olympic Games almost exclusively as a sports event, and American broadcasters provide many fewer hours of coverage than in all other developed countries. School curricula ignore the Olympic Movement, the United States Olympic Committee devotes itself solely to fund-raising and medal-winning, American IOC members are hardly national figures, and professional and college sports habitually dominate attention and conversation. Finally, the United States government is one of the tiny handful having no cabinet-level office of sport, associated in most nations of the world with national ministries of culture and education. As a consequence, perhaps only the general populations of the recent American Olympic host cities of Lake Placid, Los Angeles, Squaw Valley, and Atlanta, a cross-section of American visitors to any Olympic Games, large segments of the Greek-American community, American tourists to ancient Olympia and the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, as well as some few hundred American artists, producers, writers, diplomats, athletes, sports officials, and scholarly specialists are particularly conscious of even such obvious cultural manifestations of Olympism as the Cultural Olympiad. Studies clearly show that Americans in general are interested in much more than sports results and patriotic flag-waving at the Games, but they have few effective sources of information on the larger historical, institutional, and intercultural dimensions of the Olympic phenomenon. By contrast, one can point to Greece, where national consciousness itself is inextricably intertwined with Olympic symbolism, ritual practice, and ideology. This is because the historical connection to the ancient Olympic Games has been promoted for 150 years by the national education system, by political agencies seeking to cultivate the goodwill of outside European powers, by arts, archaeology, and classical studies institutions, and by the all-important tourist industry. The Greek Olympic Committee and the Greek government also control and support the key Olympic flame-lighting ritual and the Olympic Movement's most important educational agency, the International Olympic Academy. Segments of Greek opinion regret what they see as this nostalgic, ahistorical, and nonproductive emphasis on a distant and artificially selected past. Not a few contemporary Greeks also wish that more time, money, and energy were spent in producing successful Olympic athletes than in further struggles among cultural, political, and economic elites over who best defends Olympic/Greek values and traditions against foreign corruption. The point, however, is the difficulty of finding any Greek citizen, whether critic or partisan, who does not understand the Olympic Games first and foremost in cultural-historical and cultural-political terms. Unlike Greece and like the United States, Germany is a world power in athletics; but, like Greeks and unlike Americans, most Germans are quite familiar with the terms Olympism and Olympic Movement, including a younger generation more inclined to be skeptical than their elders. The German Olympic sports system is state-driven, IOC members and National Olympic Committee (NOC) leaders are public figures, and the news media pay as much attention to Olympic as to professional and club forms of sport. Elementary and secondary school curricula feature units on the history and humanistic aspirations of Olympism, and there are two universities devoted entirely to sport and physical education, with whole faculties specializing in Olympic affairs, including arts and cultural history. More scholarly and popular writing has appeared in German than in any other language on the topic of sport, art, and culture. German film director Leni Riefenstahl's pioneering, and in the opinion of many still the finest, documentary film Olympische Spiele (1938; Olympia) was a masterfully artistic celebration of cultures of the body at the 1936 Berlin Games. The 1972 Games in Munich meant to celebrate the connections of sport to art and culture. In world memory, however, Berlin and Munich immediately invoke images of political horror. Their tragic juxtaposition with the presentation of German civilization on the world stage is responsible in great part for the continuing importance of Olympic affairs in German cultural debates today. In the developing world the Olympic Movement has typically attracted attention for its historical, cultural, and political content long before the emergence of any national sports heroes at the Games. For example, nations in Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Central Africa have regarded appearance in the Olympic opening ceremonies parade as a critical ritual of recognition and incorporation in the global system of nation-states and as one of the very few opportunities to attract even a small measure of public and media attention from the rich countries. These are matters of human dignity and cultural presence in most cases, not illusions of economic development or North-South income transfer. Sometimes they are even conceptualized as a process of reverse colonization of the European-dominated and American-financed Olympic Movement. Whether they desire them or not, Third World athletes, IOC members, and NOC officials carry mandates to represent their home cultures, or at least the nationalized version, well beyond the requirements of athletic performance. Few Olympic sports heroes and fans from the wealthy and politically powerful countries can even remotely imagine the social and cultural significance of marathon gold medalists Abebe Bikila and Nawal el-Moutawakel or Olympic hurdler Josiah Thugwane in Ethiopia, postapartheid South Africa, and Morocco, respectively. Such facts lead scholars to believe that Olympism as such tends to be more persuasive today in the Southern than in the Northern Hemisphere, just as actually having the Olympic experience (a sense of personal joy and dignity gained from competition) tends to be inversely proportional to competitive success for today's Olympic athletes. But the dialectic of cultural expression, political freedom, and economic development is hardly unknown in the industrialized world. Because of its status as a commonwealth of the United States, Puerto Rico cannot be a member of the United Nations, conduct an independent foreign policy, or sign its own commercial treaties. But it has an independent NOC, so Puerto Rico appears as a nation among nations, a culture among world cultures, in (and only in) the Olympic and Pan American Games. Therefore, for many Puerto Ricans Olympic sport stands with literature, music, and art as a key site of production of specifically Puerto Rican national culture, so valued that the political forces promoting 51st-statehood have been blocked for decades by popular refusal to lose the independent Olympic team. These few illustrations scarcely hint at the complexity of Olympic intercultural relations, differences, and interactions among the 197 member countries of the present-day Olympic Movement. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games and the IOC, wrote in 1934, To ask the peoples of the world to love one another is merely a form of childishness. To ask them to respect one another is not in the least utopian; but in order to respect one another, it is first necessary to know one another. Besides ongoing educational institutions such as the International Olympic Academy and the Olympic Museum, intercultural information is generated and exchanged through the host city bid competition, intensive world press scrutiny of each Olympic host culture, the gigantic broadcast audiences for the opening ceremonies with their world and local cultural performances, the real or fanciful associations of certain cultures with certain sports in the athletic program, the face-to-face interactions among festival-goers, and the formal arts programs of the Cultural Olympiad that accompanies every Games. How substantial is such information and how effective is its communication? It seems impossible to generalize across all aspects of the Olympic phenomenon. Researchers are showing, for instance, that while certain Olympic host cities and nations do effectively promote positive images of themselves throughout world media, the depth of the cultural information conveyed is typically very shallow. Moreover, media attention turns away as soon as an Olympics are finished so that there is little consolidation of knowledge. How many of the millions who learned to distinguish Catalan from Spanish culture through the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona have kept up with the development of cultural autonomies in that region? Millions of Olympic partisans around the world came to understand how the total Korean cultural mobilization for the 1988 Games in Seoul hastened the end of military rule in that country. How many, a decade later, can say very much about subsequent Korean cultural politics? Being there instead of depending on mass media can make a very great difference. Though national and international media barely noticed, most Atlantans at the 1996 Games were certainly aware that eight winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature had convened under Cultural Olympiad auspices in their city the year before to discuss the role of the artist in the newly globalized world. While television viewers heard background music punctuated by a terrorist's bomb, visitors to the Atlanta Olympics nightly partook of the single most important festival of Southern music in American history. Though scarcely publicized beyond the arts community, the legacy of this Olympic Arts Festival also includes an incomparably valuable online database of Southern folk and popular artists and arts organizations in dozens of craft, genre, and performance fields. Culture is of course active and emergent as well as stable and reproductive. In 1996 approximately 30 million Americans came out to see the Olympic flame and to engage in the open-ended and largely unscripted process of linking its imagined global meanings with those of thousands of local American places and traditions. Hardly any of them knew of the extraordinary dramas that had led to that passage of the flame, not only because American television once again refused to broadcast the flame-lighting ceremony at the ruins of ancient Olympia, Greece, but because, to close the circle of this essay, American and Greek perspectives on Olympic culture are so very different as to have led to almost incomprehensible events in the past. There was a legitimate Olympic flame for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics only because 15,000 Greek troops sealed off access to the sanctuary at ancient Olympia against 30,000 Greek demonstrators who angrily vowed that the Americans would not have the sacred flame. Greek President Konstantinos Karamanlis concealed himself in some bushes, preparing to throw himself between the soldiers and demonstrators if need be. The American Olympic officials helicoptered directly into the cordoned-off site, took the flame as soon as it was lit (by a chief priestess who received scores of deaths threats for doing so), skipped the rituals at Coubertin's memorial, and to the chanted curses of the crowd lifted off back to a waiting U.S. government plane at a military airport near Athens. Needless to say, the traditional relay from Olympia to Athens, part of what is nothing less than a national ritual of the Greek people, had been canceled long before. What had caused such developments? The Los Angeles Olympic Committee had sold the rights to carry the Olympic flame in this country for $3,000 per kilometre. To majority Greek opinion this was sacrilegious commercial pollution of a symbol sacred to the world and to the Greek nation. To the Americans responsible, this attitude was incomprehensible since much of the money raised was to go to youth charities. In Greece there are few private charities and the state is responsible for youth development, so Greek authorities and journalists imagined this rationale to be a fig leaf for the same naked marketing for which the Los Angeles leaders were already infamous. In frustration at these attitudes and absolutely unable to understand the true cultural sources of their intensity, the Los Angeles authorities put it about that the Greek Olympic Committee was just trying to extort exorbitant fees for putting on the ceremonies. This canard inflamed Greek public opinion still further. Thus, in a perfect horror of intercultural ignorance and misunderstanding, the situation spiraled so very nearly out of control that the Olympic Movement was fortunate to escape its worst episode since Munich. As if this terrible legacy was not enough of a challenge to American Olympic organizers as they prepared to come for the flame in 1996, Atlanta had beaten out Athens for the right to host the Centennial Olympics. For many Greeks it was a national tragedy and humiliation that the 1996 Games would not be held in the country of their origin as the first modern Games of 1896 were, and the situation was further inflamed by defensive and widely popular claims that the IOC had sold out these Games to Atlanta-based multinational corporations such as Coca-Cola and the Cable News Network (CNN). While the American people continued to be uninformed about these 1984 events, and Los Angeles and some IOC Olympic officials continued to promote their distorted version in Olympic backstage circles, the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) commissioned their own studies of what had gone wrong in 1984. Led by ACOG top officials Billy Payne, Charles Battle, and Andrew Young, ACOG began a five-year campaign to familiarize itself with Greek Olympic cultures, to consult widely with Greek leaders in many fields, and to make themselves increasingly accessible to Greek journalists and groups of ordinary citizens. Faced with these very different kinds of Americans, Greek officials and publics in turn worked harder to respect ACOG's efforts and to understand its points of view. The astonishing result of these truly Olympian efforts at intercultural understanding and cooperation was an April morning in 1996 in the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens when Payne received a standing ovation from the 15,000 Greeks present as he lauded Greece's contribution to world civilization and to the Olympic Movement and vowedin Greek and through a popular Greek proverbto go blind rather than to bring any harm to the Olympic flame. John J. MacAloon Activities of the Jadid reformers Jadids organized New Method schools at the primary and secondary level, teaching pupils by modern pedagogical methods rather than by the rote learning that had been used in traditional schools. For the literate, Jadids published numerous short-lived newspapers and lithographed or printed many booklets. To reach the illiterate, Jadids created the first modern indigenous theatre, performing didactic plays intended to promote moral behaviour. These plays reached most of the principal towns of Turkistan, though in Bukhara and Khiva conservative Muslims delayed the entry of reformist theatre. The Jadids spread many ideas new to most Central Asians, such as women's emancipation, the improvement of public health, and local modernization and entrepreneurship. Reformers sought to end drug addiction, alcoholism, and pederasty. Edward AllworthReturn to article The Morris field trial Work had begun on a trial model of AT&T's first electronic switching system as early as 1955. The trial model was installed in the town of Morris, Ill., and went into full service on Nov. 11, 1960. The Morris field trial lasted until January 1962. As part of the trial, customers were provided with a number of features that were never before available, including abbreviated, two-digit call dialing (now known as speed dialing) and automatic call forwarding. Because the gas tubes employed in the switching system could not support the high-voltage, low-frequency current used to activate the mechanical ringers in traditional telephones, the instruments tested in the field trial incorporated electronic ringers. Actually, by the time the first call was placed in an early working replica of the Morris system, AT&T had made the decision to proceed with the development of a commercial version. This version, the No. 1 ESS, was first installed in Succasunna, N.J., on May 30, 1965. David E. BorthReturn to article Royal House and the printing telegraph In 1846 Royal E. House of the United States invented an early version of a telegraph the output of which was printed letters instead of embossed symbols. House's system employed a transmitting keyboard with 28 keys, each assigned a character. Behind the keyboard was a cylinder on the surface of which a series of pegs was set in a helix that took one turn around the cylinder. The cylinder was turned by a crank, and its motion was interrupted when a peg was blocked by a depressed key. Electric contacts that closed and opened the line, once for each letter, were positioned at the end of the cylinder. The resulting impulses through an electromagnet stepped a ratchet and printing wheel to corresponding positions at the receiver. When rotation stopped, a miniature press forced a blackened silk ribbon against an endless paper strip, backed by an embossed letter on the printing wheel, and the transmitted letter was printed. Power for House's device was obtained from a treadle-operated air compressor. The system was crude and required two men to transmit and two men to receive. Nevertheless, its speed was described as twice as fast as Morse. It lasted only a few years, but it is remarkable for its anticipation of the typewriter ribbon, the Teletype printing telegraph, and the stock ticker. Ivan Stoddard CoggeshallReturn to article ASCII-type printing telegraphs American Standard Code for Information Interchange, as signaled by the AT&T Teletype model 37 American Standard Code for Information Interchange, as signaled by the AT&T Teletype model 37 American Standard Code for Information Interchange, as signaled by the AT&T Teletype model 37 American Standard Code for Information Interchange, as signaled by the AT&T Teletype model 37 American Standard Code for Information Interchange, as signaled by the AT&T Teletype model 37 As embodied in the AT&T Teletype model 37 of 1968, the seven-level ASCII code was signaled by holes punched in an eight-level tape, as illustrated in the Figure. The circles in the Figure represent the holes, which were punched when the operator depressed keys located on a four-row keyboard. The top row of the keyboard consisted of control keys; as shown in the top line of the Figure, these signaled such functions as carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF). For alphanumeric characters, the operator depressed keys shown in the three lines at the bottom of the Figure. Depressing these keys, with appropriate shifts, punched levels 1 through 5 as shown on the tape as well as levels 6 and 7 as shown at the right. (Level 8, a parity check for errors, was punched if necessary to make the hole count even.) The seven-level code could thus signal 27, or 128, different alphanumeric characters and control functions. Among these were lower-case letters, new to general telegraphy and shown on the bottom line of the Figure. The Editors of the Encyclopdia BritannicaReturn to article Alternative sources of natural rubber during World War II After the loss of tropical Asian rubber-growing regions during World War II, Allied producers, faced with a huge wartime demand for rubber, explored the possibility of cultivating temperate-zone plants that contained latex. The most important proved to be the guayule (Parthenium argentatum), a low-growing shrub of the Compositae family that was native to north-central Mexico and southern Texas and had at one time been an important wild rubber source. The second most important source, as far as yield and low-cost production were concerned, was the Russian dandelion, or kok-saghyz (Taraxacum koksaghyz), native to the Tien Shan mountain range in Central Asia and first developed as an industrial crop by the Russians in the 1930s. Unlike latex from the Hevea brasiliensis tree, latex from the guayule plant was located in the bark, roots, leaves, and stems; its chief drawback was its high gum content (up to 50 percent). The latex of the Russian dandelion, meanwhile, contained approximately 30 percent by weight solid rubber and was found largely in the roots. Rubber was obtained from both sources by macerating, or shredding, the entire harvested plant. In the wild state, the guayule bush usually required four to five years before it could be harvested. Kok-saghyz, on the other hand, appeared to be a perennial plant but under cultivation was treated as an annual or biennial. Another rubber-yielding plant that received considerable attention during World War II was the Mexican rubber vine (Cryptostegia grandiflora and C. madagascariensis). These shrublike vines were actually indigenous to Madagascar and were cultivated in India and the Middle East before being introduced into Mexico and other parts of the North American continent. Their rubber was of uniformly high quality, and they gave their maximum yield within a year of seeding. Like that of the guayule bush, the rubber of Cryptostegia was contained in the leaves, bark, seed pods, and stems. After World War II ended in 1945, attempts to cultivate alternative supplies of rubber latex were completely overshadowed by the return of plantation rubber and the development of synthetics. Guayule and kok-saghyz are now virtually insignificant in the world rubber market--although, in the United States, for instance, research has continued into the possible cultivation of guayule in the interest of reducing dependence on foreign supplies. The Editors of the Encyclopdia BritannicaReturn to article Fax machines in Japan As the fax machine has become popular worldwide (more than 20 million Group 3 machines were sold within a decade of its introduction in 1980), it has become virtually a commodity item in Japanese offices and homes. One reason for this particular growth is the Japanese writing system. Neither the 46 kana phonetic symbols nor the approximately 2,000 kanji characters used in Japanese writing and publishing lend themselves well to computer keyboards for transmission of textual documents. The fax machine, however, does not distinguish between writing systems, making it an ideal method for transmitting Japanese documents. David E. BorthReturn to article Galileo's condemnation The condemnation of Galileo Galilei by the Inquisition in 1633 to life imprisonment for suspected heresy was considered by many even in his day to be a great tragedy. Efforts by influential persons to free him did not cease until his death, and efforts to rehabilitate him posthumously continued for centuries. In 1734 permission was obtained to move his remains from a simple grave to a suitable mausoleum in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence. Shortly afterward the Roman Catholic church relaxed its rules against discussing the motion of the Earth, although Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican remained on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the Vatican's Index of Forbidden Books) until 1835. While many have seen the condemnation of Galileo as a typical example of the struggle of the forces of reason and enlightenment against those of authority and superstition, the church has moved steadily to reassess the Galileo case. Scholars have had access to documents surrounding the church's action against Galileo since the 1870s, and Galileo's own views on the relationship between scientific research and biblical interpretation have been endorsed by the Vatican since 1893. In 1979 Pope John Paul II reiterated this view and stated that Galileo had suffered injustice at the hands of the church. A statement by the pope before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1992 is interpreted by some as a rehabilitation of Galileo. The Editors of the Encyclopdia BritannicaReturn to article London Classics The following is a special collection of historically illustrative articles and excerpts focusing on London, England. These colourfully written, provocative, and often amusing pieces have been compiled from the 2nd, 3rd, 7th, and 8th editions of Encyclopdia Britannica and from the Britannica Book of the Year printings of World War II. London in the 18th century, a contemporary description from the 3rd edition (178897), volume 10, pages 270272. Bank of England, from London, in the 3rd edition (178897), volume 10, page 251. Billingsgate, from London, in the 3rd edition (178897), volume 10, page 251. Blackfriars Bridge, from London, in the 3rd edition (178897), volume 10, page 258. Bridge-without, from London, in the 2nd edition (177784), volume 6, page 4282. British Museum, from Museum, in the 2nd edition (177784), volume 7, page 5263; and London, in the 7th edition (183042), volume 13, page 538. Crystal Palace, and its housing of the Great Exhibition of 1851, from the 8th edition (185260) articles Exhibition, volume 9, pages 453454, and Sydenham, volume 20, pages 891892. Guildhall, from London, in the 2nd edition (177784), volume 6, pages 428788. Lambeth, from London, in the 3rd edition (178897), volume 10, pages 262263. Leadenhall, from London, in the 3rd edition (178897), volume 10, page 251. London Bridge, from London, in the 3rd edition (178897), volume 10, pages 246247. The Monument, from London, in the 2nd edition (177784), volume 6, page 4289. Houses of Parliament, from London, in the 3rd edition (178897), volume 10, pages 265266. Royal Exchange, from London, in the 2nd edition (177784), volume 6, pages 428284. St. Giles's Church, from London, in the 3rd edition (178897), volume 10, pages 251252. St. Paul's Cathedral, from both the 2nd edition (177784), volume 6, pages 428486, and the 3rd edition (178897), volume 10, pages 255257. Tower of London, from London, in the 3rd edition (178897), volume 10, pages 247250. Vauxhall Gardens, from London, in the 2nd edition (177784), volume 6, pages 428889. Westminster Abbey, from London, in the 2nd edition (177784), volume 6, pages 428687. London in World War II: London in 1940, from the 1941 Britannica Book of the Year. London in 1941, from the 1942 Britannica Book of the Year. London in 1942, from the 1943 Britannica Book of the Year. London in 1943, from the 1944 Britannica Book of the Year. London in 1944, from the 1945 Britannica Book of the Year. London in 1945, from the 1946 Britannica Book of the Year. Elvis Presley: Representative Works RCA Victor has reconfigured Elvis Presley's catalog so many times that the sheer volume of releases is bewildering even to veteran admirers. (He had more than 100 entries on Billboard's album chart.) Still there are simple ways to get the basic information. Virtually all Presley's music of any importance is contained in three boxed sets, each well annotated and intelligently programmed across five volumes: The King of Rock 'n' Roll: The Complete 50's Masters (1992); From Nashville to Memphis: The Essential 60's Masters (1993); and Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential 70's Masters (1995). The Complete Sun Sessions (1987) collects all the music that Presley, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black made with Sam Phillipsfive singles releases (10 tracks), another six tracks released on early Presley albums, and another 11 outtakes and alternates. They made all this music in one year, and, if Presley had stopped there, he would still be a legend (albeit a much more obscure one). Presley was fundamentally a singles artisthis albums are valuable now in part because no one listens to singles anymoreand his biggest hits were collected on a four-LP set, Worldwide 50 Gold Award Hits, Vol. 1 (1970); there are some omissions, and there were a few hits (notably Burning Love) that came later, but this is perhaps the best single purchase a budding Presley fan can make. Known Only to Him: Elvis Gospel 19571971 (1989) collects the best of his beautiful gospel singing. The Million Dollar Quartet (1990) collects 41 trackssome mere snippets, some full-blownfeaturing Presley with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and (very briefly) Johnny Cash. The tape was made quite spontaneously (probably without any of the performers knowing that the microphones were live) on December 4, 1956, when Presley returned to Sun Studios in Memphis in the first flush of his national success. It is probably the most candid portrait of him, both as a man and as a musician. In the late 1960s comeback period three fine albums were produced: ElvisN.B.C. TV Special (1968one of a seeming infinity of albums entitled Elvis), which captures the joyous spontaneity of the TV special; From Elvis in Memphis (1969), which captures him working with a crackerjack band at American Sound Studios in his old hometown; and From Memphis to Vegas/From Vegas to Memphis (1969), which couples a hot live set from his triumphant 1969 Las Vegas appearance with more recordings made at American Sound Studios, including Suspicious Minds. Dave MarshReturn to article Hevea brasiliensis and the rise of Asian plantation rubber Natural rubber, at various times known as India rubber or caoutchouc (the French spelling of the Quechua word meaning weeping wood), has nearly always been obtained from the white, milky liquid known as latex that circulates through small tubes or veins in the inner bark of certain trees native to tropical and semitropical regions of the world. Since the early 20th century the chief source of latex has been Hevea brasiliensis (family Euphorbiaceae), a tall tree of soft wood with high, branching limbs and a large area of bark. This tree is planted in row upon row on rubber plantations that cover vast tracts of land in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria. Yet, as its botanical name suggests, Hevea brasiliensis is native to tropical regions of South America. How this wild plant of the Amazon jungles was tamed and trained to be the producer of a preeminently Asian cash crop is one of the central narratives in the history of a complex and indispensable industry. A crucial episode in that narrative--the transport of Hevea seeds from Brazil to England and from there to South and Southeast Asia--was described for the 14th edition of Encyclopdia Britannica by William Woodruff, professor of economic history and author of The Rise of the British Rubber Industry During the Nineteenth Century (1958). The traditional source of rubber, the wild trees of Central and South America, wrote Professor Woodruff, yielded a material that was of varying quality and uncertain supply. This fact ruled out the establishment of a futures market, making the rubber trade an attractive field for the speculator and a hazardous one for the manufacturer. Such uncertainty in supply could be tolerated in the early 19th century, when demand for rubber was limited to the waterproofing of fabric and the making of overshoes. But during the second half of the century conditions changed: The widespread adoption and improvement of vulcanization since 1850, coupled with the growing demand for mechanical rubber devices (created by the extension of steam and electrical power and the needs of the ever widening railway networks), resulted in the expansion of the rubber industry both in Europe and in North America. The increase of population and the rising standards of living created vast new markets for rubber footwear and clothing. The rediscovery of the pneumatic tire by John B. Dunlop in 1887, followed by the cycling craze of the 1890s, was felt on both sides of the Atlantic. Such growing demand for rubber made it necessary to widen the sources of supply. In the United States, great efforts were made to tap scrap rubber as a supply source, and indeed by the end of the 19th century U.S. consumption of reclaimed rubber equaled that of the natural product. The British, on the other hand, with a global empire at their disposal, sought to combat short supplies and fluctuating prices by increasing imports of wild rubber from Africa and by transplanting rubber seeds from the Amazon valley to British colonies in the east. At the centre of the shift of the rubber supply from West to East, Pr

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