École des Ponts ParisTech is a university-level institution of higher education and research in the field of science and technology. Founded in 1747 by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, it is one of the oldest and one of the most prestigious French Grandes Écoles, its primary mission has been to train engineering officials and civil engineers but the school now offers a wide-ranging education including computer science, applied mathematics, civil engineering, finance, innovation, urban studies and transport engineering. École des Ponts is today international: 43% of its students obtain a double degree abroad, 30% of an ingénieur cohort is foreign. It is headquartered in Marne-la-Vallée, is a founding member of ParisTech and of the Paris School of Economics; the school is under the Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy of France. Following the creation of the Corps of Bridges and Roads in 1716, the King's Council decided in 1747 to found a specific training course for the state's engineers, as École royale des ponts et chaussées.

In 1775, the school took its current name as École nationale des ponts et chaussées, by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, in a moment when the state decided to set up a progressive and efficient control of the building of roads and canals, in the training of civil engineers. The school's first director, from 1747 until 1794, was Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, civil service administrator and a contributor to the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. Without lecturer, fifty students taught themselves geometry, algebra and hydraulics. Visits of building sites, cooperations with scientists and engineers and participation to the drawing of the map of the kingdom used to complete their training, four to twelve years long. During the First French Empire run by Napoleon I from 1804 to 1814, a number of members of the Corps of Bridges and Roads took part in the reconstruction of the French road network that had not been maintained during the Revolution, in large infrastructural developments, notably hydraulic projects.

Under the orders of the emperor, French scientist Gaspard Riche de Prony, second director of the school from 1798 to 1839, adapts the education provided by the school in order to improve the training of future civil engineers, whose purpose is to rebuild the major infrastructures of the country: roads, but administrative buildings and fortifications. Prony is now considered as a historical and influential figure of the school. During the twenty years that followed the First Empire, the experience of the faculty and the alumni involved in the reconstruction influenced its training methods and internal organisation. In 1831, the school opens its first laboratory, which aims at concentrating the talents and experiences of the country's best civil engineers; the school gradually becomes a place of reflection and debates for urban planning. As a new step in the evolution of the school, the decree of 1851 insists on the organisation of the courses, the writing of an annual schedule, the quality of the faculty, the control of the students’ works.

For the first time in its history, the school opens its doors to a larger public. At this time, in France, the remarkable development of transports, roads and canals is influenced by engineers from the school, who modernised the country by creating the large traffic networks, admired in several European countries. After the Second World War, the school focused on developing the link between economics and engineering; as civil engineering was requiring higher financial investments, the state needed engineers to be able to understand the economic situation of post-war Europe. From on, the program of the school had three different aspects: scientific and technic and economic; the number of admitted students increased in order to provide both the Corps of Bridges and Roads and the private sector trained young engineers. At the time, technical progress and considerable development of sciences and techniques used in building and the protection of the environment imposed a change of strategy in the training programme.

More specialisations were progressively created and the overall programme was adapted to national issues. École des Ponts ParisTech offers high-level programmes in an extensive range of fields, with traditional competences in mathematics, computer science, civil engineering, economics, environment, town & regional planning and innovation. École des Ponts ParisTech is among the schools called "généralistes", which means that students receive a broad, management-oriented and non-specialised education. The school offers specialized/research masters and PhDs, it has opened a design school, with programmes in innovation and startup creation. This undergraduate-graduate engineering programme is the original and main programme offered by the school, it is quite different from typical university or college studies and specific to the French system of Grandes Écoles. The Ingénieur degree of École des Ponts – the Diplôme d'Ingénieur – is equivalent to a Master of Science. Admissions for engineering students is done

Symbolic speech is a legal term in United States law used to describe actions that purposefully and discernibly convey a particular message or statement to those viewing it. Symbolic speech is recognized as being protected under the First Amendment as a form of speech, but this is not expressly written as such in the document. One possible explanation as to why the Framers did not address this issue in the Bill of Rights is because the primary forms for both political debate and protest in their time were verbal expression and published word, they may have been unaware of the possibility of future people using non-verbal expression. Symbolic speech is distinguished from pure speech, the communication of ideas through spoken or written words or through conduct limited in form to that necessary to convey the idea. Although the First Amendment only limited the Congress, symbolic speech has restricted state governments starting with Gitlow v. New York. While writing the majority opinion for United States v. O'Brien, Chief Justice Warren described a series of guidelines used to determine whether a law that restricts speech violates the First Amendment.

These guidelines must remain neutral in relation to the subject of the speech at hand The O'Brien test is not meant to be the absolute deciding factor in cases involving non-verbal speech, but an additional tool to invoke against prohibitions. The O'Brien test is thus: The law in question must be within the Constitutional power of the government to enact. Further an important or substantial government interest; that interest must be unrelated to the suppression of speech Prohibit no more speech than is essential to further that interest. In December 1965, a group of five students, including lead plaintiff John Tinker and his sister Mary Beth Tinker, wore black armbands overlaid with a white peace sign between the dates of December 16 and New Years Day; the principals of the students' schools had threatened to suspend any students who participated in the protest. Despite the warning, the small group of students proceeded to carry out their dissent, were duly suspended. ACLU attorneys representing the students argued that the armbands constituted a form of symbolic speech and, because their demonstration was suppressed, their First Amendment rights were unconstitutionally restrained.

The court voted 7–2 in favor of Tinker, finding that the suspension had violated the First Amendment. Justice Fortas, delivering the opinion of the court, held the following: "In wearing armbands, the petitioners were quiet and passive, they were not disruptive, did not impinge upon the rights of others. In these circumstances, their conduct was within the protection of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth." "First Amendment rights are available to teachers and students, subject to application in light of the special characteristics of the school environment." "A prohibition against expression of opinion, without any evidence that the rule is necessary to avoid substantial interference with school discipline or the rights of others, is not permissible under the First and Fourteenth Amendments." "On the morning of March 31, 1966, David Paul O'Brien and three companions burned their Selective Service registration certificates on the steps of the South Boston Courthouse.

A sizable crowd, including several agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, witnessed the event. After the burning, members of the crowd began attacking O'Brien and his companions. An FBI agent ushered O'Brien to safety inside the courthouse. After he was advised of his right to counsel and to silence, O'Brien stated to FBI agents that he had burned his registration certificate because of his beliefs, knowing that he was violating federal law, he produced the charred remains of the certificate, with his consent, were photographed. For this act, O'Brien was indicted, tried and sentenced in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, he did not contest the fact. He stated in argument to the jury that he burned the certificate publicly to influence others to adopt his anti-war beliefs, as he put it, "so that other people would reevaluate their positions with Selective Service, with the armed forces, reevaluate their place in the culture of today, to consider my position."

The court ruled 7–1 against O'Brien. In the opinion of the court, Chief Justice Warren wrote that while the First Amendment does protect freedom of speech, it does not protect all things that may extraneously be labeled'symbolic speech'; as such, O'Brien's protest was not protected because the United States had a compelling interest in preventing the destruction or mutilation of draft cards. To help himself and future justices determine what may be protected under the free speech clause, he developed a series of requirements that laws must meet in order to stay out of conflict with the First, thus be considered constitutional, known now as the O'Brien test. In 1984, during a protest against the policies of the Reagan administration in Dallas, Gregory Lee Johnson doused an American flag, given to him by a fellow demonstrator with kerosene and set it alight while those around him chanted "America the red and blue, we spit on you." He was arrested and convicted on a flag desecration law in Texas, sentenced to one year in prison and a $2,000 fine.

The court ruled 5 to 4 in favor of Johnson. Justice Brennan wrote that because such other actions

Great Ireland known as White Men's Land, in Latin as Hibernia Major and Albania, was a land said by various Norsemen to be located near Vinland. In one report, in the Saga of Eric the Red, some skrælingar captured in Markland described the people in what was White Men's Land, to have been "dressed in white garments, uttered loud cries, bore long poles, wore fringes." Another report identifies it with the Albani people, with "hair and skin as white as snow." Scholars and writers disagree on the nature of the land, from either being treated as a myth based on faded knowledge of lands in the western ocean, to theories on locating it somewhere in North America. Celtic folklore tells of a mythical land across the western ocean referred to as the Celtic Otherworld known as Annwn or Avalon, among other names; the Byzantine scholar Procopius of Caesarea described the Otherworld of the ancient Gauls and said it was located west of Britain. Plutarch, in a chapter from the Moralia called'Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon', describes a land called Ogygia, five days sail from Britain and that the Celtic natives knew of three other lands equal distance from Ogygian and from each other in the direction of the setting sun including a'Great Continent' and'Land of Cronus' and from the ancient era until the early Christian historical era, geographers referred to the waters beyond Iceland as the ‘Cronian Sea’.

First I will tell you the author of the piece, if there is no objection, who begins after Homer’s fashion with, an isle Ogygian lies far out at sea, distant five days’ sail from Britain, going westwards, three others distant from it, from each other, are more opposite to the summer visits of the sun. The Great Continent by which the great sea is surrounded on all sides, they say, lies less distant from the others, but about five thousand stadia from Ogygia, for one sailing in a rowing-galley. Irish documents called ‘Immrama’ from the 6th and 7th centuries record the adventures of Irish priests in the western ocean while other folkloric stories tell of the Atlantic voyages of those like Saint Brendan and King Arthur considered mythical, yet Gerardus Mercator refers to a Jacob Cnoyen, who had learned that eight men returned to Norway from an expedition to the Arctic islands in 1364, in a letter to John Dee, stating that the eight men who came to Norway in 1364 were not survivors of a recent expedition, but descended from the colonists who had settled the distant lands several generations earlier and claimed to be descendants of King Arthur's expedition.

The following is a translation taken from Mercator's 1569 polar map: "we have taken from the Itinerium of Jacobus Cnoyen of the Hague, who makes some citations from the Gesta of Arthur of Britain. He was descended in the fifth generation from those whom Arthur had sent to inhabit these lands, he related that in the year 1360 a certain Minorite, an Englishman from Oxford, a mathematician, went to those islands; the four canals there pictured he said flow with such current to the inner whirlpool, that if vessels once enter they cannot be driven back by wind." According to the Landnámabók, Ari Marsson, married to Erik the Red's first cousin and related to the author of the Íslendingabók and Landnámabók, discovered the land six days' sailing west of Ireland. This journey is thought to have occurred around the year 983, their son was Ari. It lies in the ocean to westward, near Vineland the Good, said to be a six-day sail west from Ireland. Ari couldn't get away, was baptized there; this story was first told by Hrafn Limerick-Farer.

Thorkel Gellisson quoted some Icelanders who had heard Earl Thorfinn of Orkney say that Ari had been recognized in White Man's Land, couldn't get away from there, but was thought highly of. The Annals of Greenland, an 11th century Norse chronicle, says: Next to Vinland the Good and a little beyond lies Albania, Hvitramannaland. Thither were sailings from Ireland. Irishmen and Icelanders recognized Ari, son of Mar and Thorkatla from Reykjaness, of whom no tidings have been received for a long time and who became a chieftain of the land. White Men's Land is mentioned in the Saga of Eric the Red, where it is related that the inhabitants of Markland speak of it to Thorfinn Karlsefni. Now, when they sailed from Vinland, they had a southern wind, reached Markland, found five Skrælingar. Karlsefni's people caught the children, and they took the children with them, taught them their speech, they were baptized. The children called their mother Vætilldi, their father Uvægi, they said that kings ruled over the land of the Skrælingar, one of w