Chiang Kai-shek known as Chiang Chung-cheng and romanized via Mandarin as Chiang Chieh-shih and Jiang Jieshi, was a Chinese nationalist politician and military leader who served as the leader of the Republic of China between 1928 and 1975, first in mainland China until 1949 and in Taiwan until his death. Born in Chekiang Province, Chiang was a member of the Kuomintang and a lieutenant of Sun Yat-sen in the revolution to overthrow the Beiyang government and reunify China. With Soviet and communist help, Chiang organized the military for Sun's Canton Nationalist Government and headed the Whampoa Military Academy. Commander in chief of the National Revolutionary Army, he led the Northern Expedition from 1926 to 1928, before defeating a coalition of warlords and nominally reunifying China under a new Nationalist government. Midway through the campaign, the KMT–CPC alliance broke down and Chiang purged the communists inside the party, triggering a civil war with the CCP, which he lost in 1949; as leader of the Republic of China in the Nanjing decade, Chiang sought to strike a difficult balance between the modernizing China while devoting resources to defending the nation against the impending Japanese threat.

Trying to avoid a war with Japan while hostilities with CCP continued, he was kidnapped in the Xi'an Incident and obliged to form an Anti-Japanese United Front with the CCP. Following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, he mobilized China for the Second Sino-Japanese War. For eight years he led the war of resistance against a vastly superior enemy from the wartime capital Chongqing; as the leader of a major Allied power, Chiang met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U. S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Cairo Conference to discuss terms for Japanese surrender. No sooner had the Second World War ended than the Civil War with the communists, by led by Mao Zedong, resumed. Chiang's nationalists were defeated in a few decisive battles in 1948. In 1949 Chiang's government and army retreated to Taiwan, where Chiang imposed martial law and persecuted critics during the White Terror. Presiding over a period of social reforms and economic prosperity, Chiang won five elections to six-year terms as President of the Republic of China and was Director-General of the Kuomintang until his death in 1975, three years into his fifth term as President and just one year before Mao's death.

One of the longest-serving non-royal heads of state in the 20th century, Chiang was the longest-serving non-royal ruler of China having held the post for 46 years. Like Mao, he is regarded as a controversial figure. Supporters credit him with playing a major part in unifying the nation and leading the Chinese resistance against Japan, as well as with countering Soviet-communist encroachment. Detractors and critics denounce him as a dictator at the front of an authoritarian regime who suppressed opponents. Like many other Chinese historical figures, Chiang used several names throughout his life; the name inscribed in the genealogical records of his family is Chiang Chou-t `. This so-called "register name" is the one under which his extended relatives knew him, the one he used in formal occasions, such as when he got married. In deference to tradition, family members did not use the register name in conversation with people outside of the family; the concept of a "real" or original name is/was not as clear-cut in China as it is in the Western world.

In honor of tradition, Chinese families waited a number of years before naming their children. In the meantime, they used a "milk name", given to the infant shortly after his birth and known only to the close family, thus the actual name that Chiang received at birth was Jiang Ruiyuan. In 1903, the 16-year-old Chiang went to Ningbo to be a student, he chose a "school name"; this was the formal name of a person, used by older people to address him, the one he would use the most in the first decades of his life. Colloquially, the school name is called "big name", whereas the "milk name" is known as the "small name"; the school name. For the next fifteen years or so, Chiang was known as Jiang Zhiqing; this is the name under which Sun Yat-sen knew him when Chiang joined the republicans in Kwangtung in the 1910s. In 1912, when Jiang Zhiqing was in Japan, he started to use the name Chiang Kai-shek as a pen name for the articles that he published in a Chinese magazine he founded: Voice of the Army. Jieshi is the Pinyin romanization of this name, based on Mandarin, but the most recognized romanized rendering is Kai-shek, in Cantonese romanization.

As the republicans were based in Canton, Chiang became known by Westerners under the Cantonese romanization of his courtesy name, while the family name as known in English seems to be the Mandarin pronunciation of his Chinese family name, transliterated in Wade-Giles. "Kai-shek"/"Jieshi" soon became Chiang's courtesy name. Some think. Others note that the first character of his courtesy name is al

Stichaster striatus, the common light striated star, is a species of starfish in the family Stichasteridae, found in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. It was first described by the German zoologists Johannes Peter Müller and Franz Hermann Troschel in 1840. Stichaster striatus is native to the southeastern Pacific Ocean, along the coast of South America, it occurs on rocky and sandy seabeds and among kelp in intertidal areas, with a maximum depth of 80 m. This starfish is a predator. Although it has been recorded in Chile as feeding on twenty-eight different species of invertebrate, the majority of these were sessile organisms, it was not found to engage in cannibalism of its own species or to feed on other species of starfish. Many individuals were found to have regenerating arms; this is the result of attacks by the dominant predatory starfish in the region Meyenaster gelatinosus and Luidia magellanica. Starfish with missing arms are to have a certain minimum size. Juvenile S. striatus are found among the holdfasts of the kelp Lessonia nigrescens or hiding in crevices or under boulders.

It has been found that an aqueous extract of S. striatus, when fed to rats with a genetic disposition to consume alcohol to excess, reduced their voluntary intake of alcohol. This line of research was inspired by an oral tradition that Jesuit property-owners in South America in the 17th and 18th century fed "starfish soup" to their workers to encourage sobriety

Alison Mears is a certified AIA LEED AP Architect and is the current head of the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons The New School for Design. Mears was the director of the BFA Architecture and Interior Design Programs in the School of Constructed Environments and an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Parsons. Mears received her undergraduate degree in Science from the Australian National University, her Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Canberra and a Masters in Architecture from Columbia University, her prior professional experience has been with Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects, Mitchell/Giurgola and Thorp Architects. Mears manages her own office, Paci+Mears Architects in Brooklyn, New York where she works on small-scale residential and commercial projects. While running her own practice, she has directed the BFA Architecture and Interior Design programs at Parsons the New School for Design and is the current Dean of the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design, where she teaches many community-based studio courses in New Orleans, Washington, D.

C. Warren and Skid Row, Los Angeles. Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, Washington D. C. Friedrichstraße Passagen Office and Retail complex, Berlin Canary Wharf-Canada Square Office Tower, London Beatrixkwartier Office and Retail Complex, The Hague John F. Kennedy Airport Central Terminal Complex in New York City Parliament House, Canberra Mears, Alison. Seeking Shelter- An Investigation into Solutions for the Homeless. Jun 14 2012. ISBN 9781477499207. Mears, Alison, ed. INTEGRAL CITY: A collaborative design approach to downtown Greensboro, NC. Jun 2013