Appalachia is a cultural region in the Eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York State to northern Alabama and Georgia. While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Canada to Cheaha Mountain in Alabama, the cultural region of Appalachia refers only to the central and southern portions of the range, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, southwesterly to the Great Smoky Mountains; as of the 2010 United States Census, the region was home to 25 million people. Since its recognition as a distinctive region in the late 19th century, Appalachia has been a source of enduring myths and distortions regarding the isolation and behavior of its inhabitants. Early 20th century writers engaged in yellow journalism focused on sensationalistic aspects of the region's culture, such as moonshining and clan feuding, portrayed the region's inhabitants as uneducated and prone to impulsive acts of violence. Sociological studies in the 1960s and 1970s helped to dispel these stereotypes.

While endowed with abundant natural resources, Appalachia has long struggled and been associated with poverty. In the early 20th century, large-scale logging and coal mining firms brought wage-paying jobs and modern amenities to Appalachia, but by the 1960s the region had failed to capitalize on any long-term benefits from these two industries. Beginning in the 1930s, the federal government sought to alleviate poverty in the Appalachian region with a series of New Deal initiatives, such as the construction of dams to provide cheap electricity and the implementation of better farming practices. On March 9, 1965, the Appalachian Regional Commission was created to further alleviate poverty in the region by diversifying the region's economy and helping to provide better health care and educational opportunities to the region's inhabitants. By 1990, Appalachia had joined the economic mainstream, but still lagged behind the rest of the nation in most economic indicators. Since Appalachia lacks definite physiographical or topographical boundaries, there has been some disagreement over what the region encompasses.

The most used modern definition of Appalachia is the one defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission in 1965 and expanded over subsequent decades. The region defined by the Commission includes 420 counties and eight independent cities in 13 states, including all of West Virginia, 14 counties in New York, 52 in Pennsylvania, 32 in Ohio, 3 in Maryland, 54 in Kentucky, 25 counties and 8 cities in Virginia, 29 in North Carolina, 52 in Tennessee, 6 in South Carolina, 37 in Georgia, 37 in Alabama, 24 in Mississippi; when the Commission was established, counties were added based on economic need, rather than any cultural parameters. The first major attempt to map Appalachia as a distinctive cultural region came in the 1890s with the efforts of Berea College president William Goodell Frost, whose "Appalachian America" included 194 counties in 8 states. In 1921, John C. Campbell published The Southern Highlander and His Homeland in which he modified Frost's map to include 254 counties in 9 states.

A landmark survey of the region in the following decade by the United States Department of Agriculture defined the region as consisting of 206 counties in 6 states. In 1984, Karl Raitz and Richard Ulack expanded the ARC's definition to include 445 counties in 13 states, although they removed all counties in Mississippi and added two in New Jersey. Historian John Alexander Williams, in his 2002 book Appalachia: A History, distinguished between a "core" Appalachian region consisting of 164 counties in West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, a greater region defined by the ARC. In the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, Appalachian State University historian Howard Dorgan suggested the term "Old Appalachia" for the region's cultural boundaries, noting an academic tendency to ignore the southwestern and northeastern extremes of the ARC's pragmatic definition. Sean Trende, senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, defines "Greater Appalachia" in his 2012 book The Lost Majority as including both the Appalachian Mountains region and the Upland South following Ulster Protestant migrations to the Southern and Midwestern United States in the 18th and 19th centuries.

While exploring inland along the northern coast of Florida in 1528, the members of the Narváez expedition, including Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, found a Native American village near present-day Tallahassee, whose name they transcribed as Apalchen or Apalachen. The name was soon altered by the Spanish to Apalachee and used as a name for the tribe and region spreading well inland to the north. Pánfilo de Narváez's expedition first entered Apalachee territory on June 15, 1528, applied the name. Now spelled "Appalachian", it is the fourth oldest surviving European place-name in the U. S. After the de Soto expedition in 1540, Spanish cartographers began to apply the name of the tribe to the mountains themselves; the first cartographic appearance of Apalchen is on Diego Gutiérrez's map of 1562. Le Moyne was the first European to apply "Ap

MedCath Corporation was an American cardiac health care company, publicly traded on the NASDAQ. The company was founded in 1988 as MedCath Partners, a for-profit corporation which offered cath lab, nuclear cardiology, sleep medicine services. By 1998, the firm was known as Inc.. In 1994, the company began operating acute care cardiac hospitals. In the early months of 2005, MedCath shifted its corporate strategy. Instead of building cardiac hospitals and seeking physicians to invest in them, MedCath began partnering with existing hospitals or health care systems to expand existing cardiac care units or build new cardiac care units in existing hospitals; the strategy proved popular with stockholders, the company stock price rose to $31.80 in September 2006 from a low of $14 a share in May 2006. Industry observers credited the shift in strategy to the company's chief executive officer, O. Edwin French, who took over leadership of MedCath in February 2006. French hired Phil Mazzuca as chief operating officer.

On May 5, 2011, in a deal worth $25 million, MedCath sold most of its assets to a joint venture of LifePoint Hospitals and Duke University Health System. In September of 2012, facing a lawsuit, MedCath dissolved the company

Basketball is a multiplayer sports video game produced by Mattel and released for its Intellivision video game system in 1980. The players each control a basketball team competing in four timed quarters of game play. Mattel obtained a license from National Basketball Association and used the NBA logo in its box art, making it first basketball video game to be licensed by the NBA. NBA Basketball does not use player names, it was sold by Sears for its private-label version of the Intellivision console, the "Super Video Arcade," without the NBA name or logo. Each player controls a three-man basketball team controlling one team member at a time, with the computer controlling the other two. Like the real game of basketball, the player's team must score more points than the opponent's team by shooting more baskets and blocking opponent's shots on their basket; the game consists of each a simulated twelve minutes in length. The pace of the game is governed by a simulated 24-second shot clock. At the start of the quarter, the two players control the centers during the tip-off.

The team who wins the tip-off begins on offense, with the player controlling the team member with the ball. Players on offense use the keypad to select where in the offensive half of the court they wish to pass the ball. If a computer-controlled offensive team member receives the pass, control passes to that team member; when attempting to shoot the ball at the basket, players may choose between a jump shot and a set shot. On defense, the player controls one member of the team, considered the "captain." The defense can block shots, intercept passes and rebound missed shots, computer-controlled defensive team members are able to steal the ball from the offense. When a defensive team member gets the ball, the player controls that team member and switches to the offensive controls. If the score is tied at the end of the fourth quarter of play, a single five-minute overtime period is played. Due to the limitations of the system, a number of variations and changes were made to how Basketball plays versus a real-life game.

Gameplay is on a simulated regulation-style full court, whereas traditional three-on-three basketball games use only a half-court setup. There are there three-point shots; the shot clock resets not only after attempted shots and possession changes, but upon completed passes. Theoretically, an offensive team can pass the ball continually and take only a single shot within a given quarter. Basketball was reviewed by Video magazine in its "Arcade Alley" column where it was praised for its "superb" passing system. Although the reviewers noted that the game lacked free throws and free agents, their general conclusion was that the game " have fans cheering"; the game is included in the Intellivision Lives! compilation, as well as Microsoft's Game Room service, as Basketball