Braille is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired. It is traditionally written with embossed paper. Braille users can read computer screens and other electronic supports using refreshable braille displays, they can write braille with the original slate and stylus or type it on a braille writer, such as a portable braille notetaker or computer that prints with a braille embosser. Braille is named after its creator, Louis Braille, a Frenchman who lost his sight as a result of a childhood accident. In 1824, at the age of fifteen, he developed a code for the French alphabet as an improvement on night writing, he published his system, which subsequently included musical notation, in 1829. The second revision, published in 1837, was the first small binary form of writing developed in the modern era; these characters have rectangular blocks called cells. The number and arrangement of these dots distinguish one character from another. Since the various braille alphabets originated as transcription codes for printed writing, the mappings vary from language to language, within one.
Braille cells are not the only thing to appear in braille text. There may be embossed illustrations and graphs, with the lines either solid or made of series of dots, bullets that are larger than braille dots, etc. A full braille cell includes six raised dots arranged in each column having three dots; the dot positions are identified by numbers from one to six. There are 64 possible combinations, including no dots at all for a word space. A cell can be used to represent a letter, punctuation mark, or a word. Braille literacy is a social-justice issue. Early braille education is crucial to literacy and employment among the blind. However, in the face of changes in education policy and screen reader software, braille usage has declined in recent decades, despite the fact that technologies such as braille displays have made braille more accessible and practical. Braille was based on a tactile military code called night writing, developed by Charles Barbier in response to Napoleon's demand for a means for soldiers to communicate silently at night and without a light source.
In Barbier's system, sets of 12 embossed dots encoded 36 different sounds. It was rejected by the military. In 1821 Barbier visited the Royal Institute for the Blind in Paris. Braille identified two major defects of the code: first, by representing only sounds, the code was unable to render the orthography of the words. Braille's solution was to use 6-dot cells and to assign a specific pattern to each letter of the alphabet. At first, Braille was a one-to-one transliteration of French orthography, but soon various abbreviations and logograms were developed, creating a system much more like shorthand; the expanded English system, called Grade-2 Braille, was completed by 1905. For blind readers, Braille is an independent writing system, rather than a code of printed orthography. Braille is derived from the Latin alphabet, albeit indirectly. In Braille's original system, the dot patterns were assigned to letters according to their position within the alphabetic order of the French alphabet, with accented letters and w sorted at the end.
The first ten letters of the alphabet, a–j, use the upper four dot positions: ⠁⠃⠉⠙⠑⠋⠛⠓⠊⠚. These stand for the ten digits 1–9 and 0 in a system parallel to Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy; the next ten letters, k–t, are identical to a–j apart from the addition of a dot at position 3: ⠅⠇⠍⠝⠕⠏⠟⠗⠎⠞: The next ten letters are the same again, but with dots at both position 3 and position 6. Here w was left out as not being a part of the official French alphabet at the time of Braille's life; the next ten letters, ending in w, are the same again, except that for this series position 6 is used without a dot at position 3. In French braille these are the letters â ê î ô û ë ï ü ö w. W had been tacked onto the end of 39 letters of the French alphabet to accommodate English; the a -- j series shifted down by one dot. Letters a ⠁ and c ⠉, which only use dots in the top row, were shifted two places for the apostrophe and hyphen: ⠄⠤. In addition, there are ten patterns that are based on the first two letters with their dots shifted to the right.
There had been nine decades. The fifth through ninth used dashes as well as dots, but pr
Félix Couchoro was a Togolese writer and educator. Couchoro was born on 30 January 1900 in Dahomey, to Dahomeyan parents, he attended primary school and secondary school at the Catholic mission in Grand-Popo and the Minor Seminary of St. Joan of Arc in Ouidah from 1915 to 1919, he taught at the Catholic school in Grand Popo from 1919 to 1924. Between 1924 and 1939 Couchoro managed a branch of the Société Commerciale de l’Ouest Africain. In 1929, Couchoro's first book, L'Esclave, was published in Paris, the second novel published by an African in French, but the book remained obscure for years, he edited the newspaper Éveil Togolais from 1931 to 1933, renamed Éveil Togo-Dahoméen. In the paper, he advocated for greater freedom of trade between Togo. Couchoro invented Onitsha-style chapbooks during this time. In 1939, police harassment forced him to take refuge in Anecho in Togo. From 1939 to 1952, he worked as a business agent in Anecho and became a nationalist in the Committee of the Togolese Unit, Sylvanus Olympio's party.
He began publishing books in serial form in the newspaper Togo-Presse, beginning with Amour de féticheuse in 1941. He worked on the editorial team of several newspapers. However, he soon became the target of police repression again. After a riot in Vogan in 1952, he escaped to Ghana, to avoid being jailed, his business failed and he was low on money in Ghana. He returned to Togo in 1958 and found a job in Lomé; when Togo became independent in 1960, Couchoro was appointed an editor at Information Service. He retired from this post in 1965, died on 5 April 1968 in Lomé. Professor Martin Gbenouga, head of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Lomé, said that Félix Couchoro "is an author sufficiently rich but not famous enough." In 2015, more than eighty years after it was written, his second book Amour de Féticheuse was published. L'Esclave, 1929 Amour de féticheuse, 1941 Drama d'amour à Anecho, 1950 L'héritage cette peste, 1963 Amour de Féticheuse, 2015
Anti-clerical art is a genre of art portraying clergy Roman Catholic clergy, in unflattering contexts. It was popular in France during the second half of the 19th century, at a time that the anti-clerical message suited the prevailing political mood. Typical paintings show cardinals in their bright red robes engaging in unseemly activities within their lavish private quarters. Nineteenth and early twentieth century artists known for their anti-clerical art include Francesco Brunery, Georges Croegaert, Charles Édouard Delort, Jehan Georges Vibert, Jules Benoit-Levy, Adolphe Henri Laissement and Eduardo Zamacois y Zabala. Anti-Catholicism Anti-clericalism Hook and Mark Poltimore, Popular 19th century painting, a dictionary of European genre painters, Suffolk, Antique Collectors’ Club Ltd, 1985. Media related to Anti-clerical art at Wikimedia Commons
An agroecosystem is the basic unit of study in agroecology, is somewhat arbitrarily defined as a spatially and functionally coherent unit of agricultural activity, includes the living and nonliving components involved in that unit as well as their interactions. An agroecosystem can be viewed as a subset of a conventional ecosystem; as the name implies, at the core of an agroecosystem lies the human activity of agriculture. However, an agroecosystem is not restricted to the immediate site of agricultural activity, but rather includes the region, impacted by this activity by changes to the complexity of species assemblages and energy flows, as well as to the net nutrient balance. Traditionally an agroecosystem one managed intensively, is characterized as having a simpler species composition and simpler energy and nutrient flows than "natural" ecosystem. Agroecosystems are associated with elevated nutrient input, much of which exits the farm leading to eutrophication of connected ecosystems not directly engaged in agriculture.
Some major organizations are hailing farming within agro ecosystems as the way forward for mainstream agriculture. Current farming methods have resulted in over-stretched water resources, high levels of erosion and reduced soil fertility. According to a report by the International Water Management Institute and the United Nations Environment Programme, there is not enough water to continue farming using current practices; the report suggested assigning value to ecosystems, recognizing environmental and livelihood tradeoffs, balancing the rights of a variety of users and interests, as well addressing inequities that sometimes result when such measures are adopted, such as the reallocation of water from poor to rich, the clearing of land to make way for more productive farmland, or the preservation of a wetland system that limits fishing rights. Forest gardens are the world's oldest and most resilient agroecosystem. Forest gardens originated in prehistoric times along jungle-clad river banks and in the wet foothills of monsoon regions.
In the gradual process of a family improving their immediate environment, useful tree and vine species were identified and improved whilst undesirable species were eliminated. Superior foreign species were selected and incorporated into the family's garden. One of the major efforts of disciplines such as agroecology is to promote management styles that blur the distinction between agroecosystems and "natural" ecosystems, both by decreasing the impact of agriculture and by increasing awareness that "downstream" effects extend agroecosystems beyond the boundaries of the farm. In the first case, polyculture or buffer strips for wildlife habitat can restore some complexity to a cropping system, while organic farming can reduce nutrient inputs. Efforts of the second type are most common at the watershed scale. An example is the National Association of Conservation Districts' Lake Mendota Watershed Project, which seeks to reduce runoff from the agricultural lands feeding into the lake with the aim of reducing algal blooms.
Agriculture Agriculture in Concert with the Environment Agroecological restoration Agroecology Agroecosystem analysis Agrophysics Ecology of contexts Polyculture Loucks, Orie. "Emergence of Research on Agro-Ecosystems". Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. 8: 173–192. Doi:10.1146/annurev.es.08.110177.001133. Retrieved December 7, 2004
The Zhongwei is a breed of goat from the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Gansu Province of China. It lives on arid desert steppes, is adapted to a diet of salty and sandy plants and shrubs, it is used for the production of kid pelts, secondarily for cashmere fiber. The breed has low genetic variability due to the historic selection of pelt production traits, it is related to the Funiu White, Hexi Cashmere, Luliang Black, Taihang breeds. Males weigh 39 kg on average, females weigh 24.5 kg on average. Both males and females grow spiral horns; the fur color is white, black. Kids are killed when they are 35 days old for their curly pelts. Zhongwei reach sexual maturity at 5–6 months of age, are mated at 18 months of age with a kidding percentage of 104-106%. Although they are used for kid pelts, Zhongwei can be used for cashmere production. Males grow 140 g of cashmere on average and females grow 120 g on average, at a cashmere percentage of 25%, length of 7.0 cm and 12.5 microns. The quality of fur produced has declined, due to degradation of the land they graze on.
Walter Lang was an American film director. Walter Lang was born in Tennessee; as a young man he went to New York City. The business piqued his artistic instincts and he began learning the various facets of filmmaking and worked as an assistant director. However, Lang had ambitions to be a painter and left the United States for a time to join the great gathering of artists and writers in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France. Things did not work out as Lang hoped and he returned home and to the film business. In 1925, Walter Lang directed The Red Kimono. In the mid-1930s, he was hired by 20th Century Fox where, as a director, he "painted" a number of the spectacular colorful musicals for which Fox Studios became famous for producing during the 1940s. One of Lang's most recognized films is the lavish adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musicalThe King and I for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Directing. and his star, Yul Brynner, won the Oscar for Best Actor in a role he immortalized.
Another is State Fair a Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, shown to WW2 servicemen around the world in the last months of the war. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Walter Lang has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6520 Hollywood Blvd. Lang was married to Madalynne Field from 1937 until his death. Field, a former actress, had met and befriended Carole Lombard when they were employed as Sennett Bathing Beauties in the late 1920s. Field's film career ended with the demise of Sennett's studio. However, she maintained her friendship with Lombard, acted as Lombard's secretary until her marriage, she met Lang. Lang was buried in Inglewood, California. Walter Lang on IMDb