Month: August 2015

In Articles

Television has played a pivotal role in the socialization of the 20th and 21st centuries

Artisan Themesby Artisan Themes

A television, commonly referred to as TV, telly or the tube, is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting sound with moving images in monochrome (black-and-white), colour, or in three dimensions. It can refer to a television set, a television program, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium, for entertainment, educational television, news and advertising .

Television became available in crude experimental forms in the late 1920s. After World War II, an improved form became popular in the United States and Britain, and television sets became commonplace in homes, businesses, and institutions. During the 1950s, television was the primary medium for influencing public opinion. In the mid-1960s, color broadcasting was introduced in the US and most other developed countries. The availability of storage media such as VHS tape (1976), DVDs (1997), and high-definition Blu-ray Discs (2006) enabled viewers to watch recorded material such as movies. At the end of the first decade of the 2000s, digital television transmissions greatly increased in popularity. Another development was the move from standard-definition television (SDTV)(576i, with 576 interlaced lines of resolution and 480i) to high-definition television (HDTV), which provides a resolution that is substantially higher. HDTV may be transmitted in various formats: 1080p, 1080i and 720p. Since 2010, with the invention of smart television, Internet television has increased the availability of television programs and movies via the Internet through services such as Netflix, iPlayer, Hulu, Roku and Chromecast.

In 2013, 79% of the world’s households owned a television set. The replacement of early bulky, high-voltage cathode ray tube (CRT) screen displays with compact, energy-efficient, flat-panel alternative technologies such as plasma displays, LCDs (both fluorescent-backlit and LED), and OLED displays was a hardware revolution that began with computer monitors in the late 1990s. Most TV sets sold in the 2000s were flat-panel, mainly LEDs. Major manufacturers announced the discontinuation of CRT, DLP, plasma, and even fluorescent-backlit LCDs by the mid-2010s. LEDs are expected to be replaced gradually by OLEDs in the near future. Also, major manufacturers have announced that they will increasingly produce smart TV sets in the mid-2010s. Smart TVs with integrated Internet and Web 2.0 functions are expected to become the dominant form of television set by the late 2010s.

Television signals were initially distributed only as terrestrial television using high-powered radio-frequency transmitters to broadcast the signal to individual television receivers. Alternatively television signals are distributed by co-axial cable or optical fibre, satellite systems and via the Internet. Until the early 2000s, these were transmitted as analog signals but countries started switching to digital, this transition is expected to be completed worldwide by late 2010s. A standard television set is composed of multiple internal electronic circuits, including a tuner for receiving and decoding broadcast signals. A visual display device which lacks a tuner is correctly called a video monitor rather than a television.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television

In Videos

You make me feel so young by Frank Sinatra, 1962

Artisan Themesby Artisan Themes

Youth is the time of life when one is young, but often means the time between childhood and adulthood (maturity). It is also defined as “the appearance, freshness, vigor, spirit, etc., characteristic of one who is young”. Its definitions of a specific age range varies, as youth is not defined chronologically as a stage that can be tied to specific age ranges; nor can its end point be linked to specific activities, such as taking unpaid work or having sexual relations. An individual’s actual maturity may not correspond to their chronological age, as immature individuals can exist at all ages.

Youth is an experience that may shape an individual’s level of dependency, which can be marked in various ways according to different cultural perspectives. Personal experience is marked by an individual’s cultural norms or traditions, while a youth’s level of dependency means the extent to which they still rely on their family emotionally and economically.

In Food

How to make a good sandwich

Artisan Themesby Artisan Themes

A sandwich is a food item consisting of one or more types of food, such as sliced cheese or meat, placed on or between slices of bread, or more generally any dish wherein two or more pieces of bread serve as a container or wrapper for some other food.

The sandwich was originally a portable food item or finger food which began to be popular in the Western World. Today sandwiches in various versions are found worldwide.

Sandwiches are a popular type of lunch food, taken to work, school, or picnics to be eaten as part of a packed lunch. The bread can be used plain, or it can be coated with one or more condiments such as mayonnaise or mustard to enhance the flavours and texture. As well as being homemade, sandwiches are also widely sold in restaurants and cafes, and are sometimes served hot as well as cold. There are both savoury sandwiches, such as deli meat sandwiches, and sweet sandwiches, such as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The sandwich is considered to be the namesake of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, because of the claim that he was the eponymous inventor of this food combination. The Wall Street Journal has described it as Britain’s “biggest contribution to gastronomy”.

The first written usage of the English word appeared in Edward Gibbon’s journal, in longhand, referring to “bits of cold meat” as a “Sandwich”. It was named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, an 18th-century English aristocrat. It is said that he ordered his valet to bring him meat tucked between two pieces of bread, and others began to order “the same as Sandwich!” It is commonly said that Lord Sandwich was fond of this form of food because it allowed him to continue playing cards, particularly cribbage, while eating, without using a fork, and without getting his cards greasy from eating meat with his bare hands.

The rumour in its familiar form appeared in Pierre-Jean Grosley’s Londres (Neichatel, 1770), translated as A Tour to London 1772; Grosley’s impressions had been formed during a year in London in 1765. The sober alternative is provided by Sandwich’s biographer, N. A. M. Rodger, who suggests Sandwich’s commitments to the navy, and to politics and the arts, mean the first sandwich was more likely to have been consumed at his desk.

Before being known as sandwiches, this food combination seems to simply have been known as “bread and meat” or “bread and cheese”.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandwich

In Videos

Johnny Express: will he be able to finish his mission without trouble?

Artisan Themesby Artisan Themes

There are all sorts of Aliens living throughout space. Johnny is a Space Delivery Man who travels to different planets to deliver packages. Johnny is lazy and his only desire is to sleep in his autopilot spaceship. When the spaceship arrives at the destination, all he has to do is simply deliver the box.

However, it never goes as planned. Johnny encounters strange and bizarre planets and always seems to cause trouble on his delivery route.

Will he be able to finish his mission without trouble?

In Articles

Because life needs music

Artisan Themesby Artisan Themes

A musician (or instrumentalist) is a person who plays a musical instrument or is musically talented, or one who composes, conducts, or performs music.

Musicians can specialize in any musical style, and some musicians play in a variety of different styles. Examples of a musician’s possible skills include performing, conducting, singing, composing, arranging, and the orchestration of music.

Medieval musicians

In the Middle Ages, instrumental musicians mostly improvised with soft ensembles inside and loud instruments outdoors. Many European musicians of this time catered to the Roman Catholic Church, providing arrangements structured around Gregorian chant structure and Masses from church texts.[4]

Notable musicians

Phillipe de Vitry
Guillaume Dufay
Guillaume de Machaut
Hildegard of Bingen
John Jenkins

Renaissance musicians

Renaissance musicians produced music that could be played during masses in churches and important chapels. Vocal pieces were in Latin—the language of church texts of the time—and typically were Church-polyphonic or “made up of several simultaneous melodies.” By the end of the 16th century, however, patronage split among many areas: the Catholic Church, Protestant churches, royal courts, wealthy amateurs, and music printing—all provided income sources for composers.

Notable musicians

Giovanni Gabrieli
Thomas Tallis
Claudio Monteverdi
Leonardo da Vinci

Baroque musicians

The Baroque period (about 1600 to 1750) introduced heavy use of counterpoint and basso continuo characteristics. Vocal and instrumental “color” became more important compared to the Renaissance style of music, and emphasized much of the volume, texture and pace of each piece.

Notable musicians

George Frideric Handel
Johann Sebastian Bach
Antonio Vivaldi

Classical musicians

Classical music was created by musicians who lived during a time of a rising middle class. Many middle-class inhabitants of France at the time lived under long-time absolute monarchies. Because of this, much of the music was performed in environments that were more constrained compared to the flourishing times of the Renaissance and Baroque eras.

Notable musicians

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Joseph Haydn
Ludwig Van Beethoven

Romantic musicians

The foundation of Romantic period music coincides with what is often called the age of revolutions, an age of upheavals in political, economic, social, and military traditions. This age included the initial transformations of the Industrial Revolution. A revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism, which quite consciously set out to transform not only the theory and practice of poetry and art, but the common perception of the world. Some major Romantic Period precepts survive, and still affect modern culture.

Notable musicians

Ludwig van Beethoven
Frédéric Chopin
Franz Schubert
Franz Liszt
Richard Wagner
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Johannes Brahms
Johann Strauss II

20th century

The world transitioned from 19th-century Romanticism to 20th century Modernism, bringing major musical changes. In 20th-century music, composers and musicians rejected the emotion-dominated Romantic period, and strove to represent the world the way they perceived it. Artists wrote to be “…objective, while objects existed on their own terms. While past eras concentrated on spirituality, this new period placed emphasis on physicality and things that were concrete.”

The advent of audio recording and mass media in the 20th century caused a boom of all kinds of music—popular music, rock music, electronic music, folk music and all forms of classical music.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musician

In Articles

Google: Organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible.

Artisan Themesby Artisan Themes

Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software. Most of its profits are derived from AdWords, an online advertising service that places advertising near the list of search results.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 14 percent of its shares but control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” and its unofficial slogan was “Don’t be evil”. In 2004, Google moved to its new headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. In August 2015, Google announced plans to restructure under a new holding company called Alphabet Inc.

Rapid growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions and partnerships beyond Google’s core search engine. It offers online productivity software including email (Gmail), a cloud storage service (Google Drive), an office suite (Google Docs) and a social networking service (Google+). Desktop products include applications for web browsing, organizing and editing photos, and instant messaging. The company leads the development of the Android mobile operating system and the browser-only Chrome OS for a netbook known as a Chromebook. Google has moved increasingly into communications hardware: it partners with major electronics manufacturers in the production of its “high-quality low-cost” Nexus devices and acquired Motorola Mobility in May 2012. In 2012, a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas City to facilitate a Google Fiber broadband service.

The corporation has been estimated to run more than one million servers in data centers around the world (as of 2007). It processes over one billion search requests and about 24 petabytes of user-generated data each day (as of 2009). In December 2013, Alexa listed google.com as the most visited website in the world. Numerous Google sites in other languages figure in the top one hundred, as do several other Google-owned sites such as YouTube and Blogger. Its market dominance has led to prominent media coverage, including criticism of the company over issues such as search neutrality, copyright, censorship, and privacy.

History

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California.

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites. They called this new technology PageRank; it determined a website’s relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.

A small search engine called “RankDex” from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking. The technology in RankDex was patented in July 1999 and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.

Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine “BackRub”, because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word “googol”, the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. Originally, Google ran under Stanford University’s website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.

The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in the garage of a friend (Susan Wojcicki) in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.

In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase from May 2010 (931 million). In January 2013, Google announced it had earned US$50 billion in annual revenue for the year of 2012. This marked the first time the company had reached this feat, topping their 2011 total of $38 billion.

The company has reported fourth quarter (Dec 2014) Earnings Per Share (EPS) of $6.88 – $0.20 under projections. Revenue came in at $14.5 billion (16.9% growth year over year), also under expectations by $110 million.

Alphabet

On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a holding company, Alphabet Inc., with Google as its leading subsidiary. Google will continue to be the umbrella company for Alphabet’s Internet interests. Upon completion of the restructure, Sundar Pichai will become CEO of Google.

Products and services

Advertising

Google on ad-tech London, 2010.
For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues. In 2011, 96% of Google’s revenue was derived from its advertising programs. In addition to its own algorithms for understanding search requests, Google uses technology from the company DoubleClick, to project user interest and target advertising to the search context and the user history.

Google Analytics allows website owners to track where and how people use their website, for example by examining click rates for all the links on a page. Google advertisements can be placed on third-party websites in a two-part program. Google’s AdWords allows advertisers to display their advertisements in the Google content network, through either a cost-per-click or cost-per-view scheme. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website and earn money every time ads are clicked.

One of the criticisms of this program is the possibility of click fraud, which occurs when a person or automated script clicks on advertisements without being interested in the product, causing the advertiser to pay money to Google unduly. Industry reports in 2006 claimed that approximately 14 to 20 percent of clicks were fraudulent or invalid.

In February 2003, Google stopped showing the advertisements of Oceana, a non-profit organization protesting a major cruise ship’s sewage treatment practices. Google cited its editorial policy at the time, stating “Google does not accept advertising if the ad or site advocates against other individuals, groups, or organizations.” The policy was later changed. In June 2008, Google reached an advertising agreement with Yahoo!, which would have allowed Yahoo! to feature Google advertisements on its web pages. The alliance between the two companies was never completely realized because of antitrust concerns by the U.S. Department of Justice. As a result, Google pulled out of the deal in November 2008.

In an attempt to advertise its own products, Google launched a website called Demo Slam, developed to demonstrate technology demos of Google Products.

Search engine

Main article: Google Search

Google homepage as of December 22, 2013
According to market research published by comScore in November 2009, Google Search is the dominant search engine in the United States market, with a market share of 65.6%. Google indexes billions of web pages, so that users can search for the information they desire through the use of keywords and operators.

In 2003, The New York Times complained about Google’s indexing, claiming that Google’s caching of content on its site infringed its copyright for the content. In this case, the United States District Court of Nevada ruled in favor of Google in Field v. Google and Parker v. Google. The publication 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has compiled a list of words that the web giant’s new instant search feature will not search.

Google Watch has criticized Google’s PageRank algorithms, saying that they discriminate against new websites and favor established sites. The site has also alleged that there are connections between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Google also hosts Google Books. The company began scanning books and uploading limited previews, and full books where allowed, into its new book search engine. The Authors Guild, a group that represents 8,000 U.S. authors, filed a class action suit in a New York City federal court against Google in 2005 over this service. Google replied that it is in compliance with all existing and historical applications of copyright laws regarding books. Google eventually reached a revised settlement in 2009 to limit its scans to books from the U.S., the UK, Australia, and Canada. Furthermore, the Paris Civil Court ruled against Google in late 2009, asking it to remove the works of La Martinière (Éditions du Seuil) from its database. In competition with Amazon.com, Google sells digital versions of new books.

On July 21, 2010, in response to Bing, Google updated its image search to display a streaming sequence of thumbnails that enlarge when pointed at. Though web searches still appear in a batch per page format, on July 23, 2010, dictionary definitions for certain English words began appearing above the linked results for web searches.

The “Hummingbird” update to the Google search engine was announced in September 2013. The update was introduced over the month prior to the announcement and allows users ask the search engine a question in natural language rather than entering keywords into the search box.

Productivity tools

Gmail, a free webmail service provided by Google, was launched as an invitation-only beta program on April 1, 2004, and became available to the public on February 7, 2007. The service was upgraded from beta status on July 7, 2009, at which time it had 146 million users monthly. The service was the first online email service with one gigabyte of storage. It was also the first to keep emails from the same conversation together in one thread, similar to an Internet forum. The service offers over 15 GB of free storage, shared with other Google Apps, with additional storage ranging from 20 GB to 16 TB available for $0.25 per 1 GB per year.

Gmail uses AJAX, a programming technique that allows web pages to be interactive without refreshing the browser. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft’s former CEO), Liz Figueroa, Mark Rasch, and the editors of Google Watch have criticised the privacy of Gmail, but Google claims that mail sent to or from Gmail is never read by a human being beyond the account holder and is only used to improve relevance of advertisements.

In 2004, Google started open source software project hosting, called Google Code, which allows developers to download in-development programs at no charge. Google Drive, another part of Google’s productivity suite, allows users to create, edit, and collaborate on documents in an online environment, similar to Microsoft Word. The service was originally called Writely, but was obtained by Google on March 9, 2006, and was released as an invitation-only preview. On June 6 after the acquisition, Google created an experimental spreadsheet editing program, which was combined with Google Docs on October 10.

Google for Work is a service from Google that provides customizable enterprise versions of several Google products using a domain name provided by the customer. It features several Web applications with similar functionality to traditional office suites, including Gmail, Hangouts, Google Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Groups, News, Play, Sites, and Vault. It was the vision of Rajen Sheth, a Google employee who later developed Chromebooks.

Doodles

Since 1998, Google has been designing special, temporary alternate logos to place on their homepage intended to celebrate holidays, events, achievements and people. The first Google Doodle was in honor of the Burning Man Festival of 1998. The doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to notify users of their absence in case the servers crashed. Subsequent Google Doodles were designed by an outside contractor, until Larry and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to design a logo for Bastille Day in 2000. From that point onward, Doodles have been organized and created by a team of employees termed “Doodlers”.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google