Ireland
Ireland is an island in the North Atlantic. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, St George's Channel. Ireland is the second-largest island of the British Isles, the third-largest in Europe, the twentieth-largest on Earth. Politically, Ireland is divided between the Republic of Ireland, which covers five-sixths of the island, Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom. In 2011, the population of Ireland was about 6.6 million, ranking it the second-most populous island in Europe after Great Britain. Just under 4.8 million live in the Republic of Ireland and just over 1.8 million live in Northern Ireland. The island's geography comprises low-lying mountains surrounding a central plain, with several navigable rivers extending inland, its lush vegetation is a product of its mild but changeable climate, free of extremes in temperature. Much of Ireland was woodland until the end of the Middle Ages. Today, woodland makes up about 10% of the island, compared with a European average of over 33%, most of it is non-native conifer plantations.
There are twenty-six extant mammal species native to Ireland. The Irish climate is influenced by the Atlantic Ocean and thus moderate, winters are milder than expected for such a northerly area, although summers are cooler than those in continental Europe. Rainfall and cloud cover are abundant; the earliest evidence of human presence in Ireland is dated at 10,500 BC. Gaelic Ireland had emerged by the 1st century AD; the island was Christianised from the 5th century onward. Following the 12th century Norman invasion, England claimed sovereignty. However, English rule did not extend over the whole island until the 16th–17th century Tudor conquest, which led to colonisation by settlers from Britain. In the 1690s, a system of Protestant English rule was designed to materially disadvantage the Catholic majority and Protestant dissenters, was extended during the 18th century. With the Acts of Union in 1801, Ireland became a part of the United Kingdom. A war of independence in the early 20th century was followed by the partition of the island, creating the Irish Free State, which became sovereign over the following decades, Northern Ireland, which remained a part of the United Kingdom.
Northern Ireland saw much civil unrest from the late 1960s until the 1990s. This subsided following a political agreement in 1998. In 1973 the Republic of Ireland joined the European Economic Community while the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, as part of it, did the same. Irish culture has had a significant influence on other cultures in the field of literature. Alongside mainstream Western culture, a strong indigenous culture exists, as expressed through Gaelic games, Irish music and the Irish language; the island's culture shares many features with that of Great Britain, including the English language, sports such as association football, horse racing, golf. The names Éire derive from Old Irish Eriu; this in turn comes from the Proto-Celtic *Iveriu, the source of Latin Hibernia. Iveriu derives from a root meaning'fat, prosperous'. During the last glacial period, up until about 10,000 BC, most of Ireland was periodically covered in ice. Sea levels were lower and Ireland, like Great Britain, formed part of continental Europe.
By 16,000 BC, rising sea levels due to ice melting caused Ireland to become separated from Great Britain. Around 6000 BC, Great Britain itself became separated from continental Europe; the earliest evidence of human presence in Ireland is dated at 10,500 BC, demonstrated by a butchered bear bone found in a cave in County Clare. It is not until about 8000 BC, that more sustained occupation of the island has been shown, with evidence for Mesolithic communities around the island; these Mesolithic communities lived as hunter-gatherers across the island until about 4000 BC. Some time before 4000 BC, Neolithic settlers arrived introducing cereal cultivars, domesticated animals such as cattle and sheep, large timber building, stone monuments; the earliest evidence for farming in Ireland or Great Britain is from Co.. Kerry, where a flint knife, cattle bones and a sheep's tooth were carbon-dated to c. 4350 BC. Field systems were developed in different parts of Ireland, including at the Céide Fields, preserved beneath a blanket of peat in present-day Tyrawley.
An extensive field system, arguably the oldest in the world, consisted of small divisions separated by dry-stone walls. The fields were farmed for several centuries between 3500 BC and 3000 BC. Wheat and barley were the principal crops; the Bronze Age – defined by the use of metal – began around 2500 BC, with technology changing people's everyday lives during this period through innovations such as the wheel. According to John T. Koch and others, Ireland in the Late Bronze Age was part of a maritime trading-network culture called the Atlantic Bronze Age that included Britain, western France and Iberia, that this is where Celtic languages developed; this contrasts with the traditional view that their origin lies in mainland Europe with the Hallstatt culture. During the Iron Age, a Celtic language and culture emerged in Ireland. How and when the island became Celtic has been debated for close to a century, with the migrations of the Celts being one of the more enduring themes of archaeological and linguistic studies.
The most recent genetic research s
Tate Britain
Tate Britain is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in England, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives, it is the oldest gallery in the network, having opened in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the art of the United Kingdom since Tudor times, in particular has large holdings of the works of J. M. W. Turner, who bequeathed all his own collection to the nation, it is one of the largest museums in the country. The gallery is situated on the site of the former Millbank Prison. Construction, undertaken by Higgs and Hill, commenced in 1893, the gallery opened on 21 July 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art. However, from the start it was known as the Tate Gallery, after its founder Sir Henry Tate, in 1932 it adopted that name. Before 2000, the gallery housed and displayed both British and modern collections, but the launch of Tate Modern saw Tate's modern collections move there, while the old Millbank gallery became dedicated to the display of historical and contemporary British art.
As a consequence, it was renamed Tate Britain in March 2000. The front part of the building was designed by Sidney R. J. Smith with a classical portico and dome behind, the central sculpture gallery was designed by John Russell Pope. Tate Britain includes the Clore Gallery of 1987, designed by James Stirling, which houses work by J. M. W. Turner; the Clore Gallery has been regarded as an important example of Postmodern architecture in the use of contextual irony: each section of the external facade quotes liberally from the building next to it in regard to materials and detailing. Crises during its existence include flood damage to work from the River Thames, bomb damage during World War II. However, most of the collection was in safe storage elsewhere during the war, a large Stanley Spencer painting, deemed too big to move, had a protective brick wall built in front of it. In 1970, the building was given Grade II* listed status. In 2012, Tate Britain announced that it had raised the £45 million required to complete a major renovation thanks to a £4.9 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and £1 million given by Tate Members.
The museum stayed open throughout the three phases of renovation. Completed in 2013, the newly designed sections were conceived by the architects Caruso St John and included a total of nine new galleries, with reinforced flooring to accommodate heavy sculptures. A second part was unveiled that year, the centrepiece being the reopening of the building's Thames-facing entrance as well as a new spiral staircase beneath its rotunda; the circular balcony of the rotunda's domed atrium, closed to visitors since the 1920s, was reopened. The gallery now has a dedicated schools' entrance and reception beneath its entrance steps on Millbank and a new archive gallery for the presentation of temporary displays; the front entrance is accessible by steps. A side entrance at a lower level has a ramp for wheelchair access; the gallery provides a restaurant and a café, as well as a Friends room, open only to members of the Tate. This membership is open to the public on payment of an annual subscription; as well as administration offices the building complex houses the Prints and Drawings Rooms, as well as the Library and Archive in the Hyman Kreitman Reading Rooms.
The restaurant features a mural by Rex Whistler. Tate Britain and Tate Modern are now connected by a high speed boat along the River Thames, which runs from Millbank Millennium Pier outside Tate Britain; the boat is decorated with spots, based on paintings of similar appearance by Damien Hirst. The lighting artwork incorporated in the pier's structure is by Angela Bulloch; the main display spaces show the permanent collection of historic British art, as well as contemporary work. It has rooms dedicated to works by one artist, such as: Tracey Emin, John Latham, Douglas Gordon, Sam Taylor-Wood, Tacita Dean, Marcus Gheeraerts II, though these, like the rest of the collection, are subject to rotation; the gallery organises career retrospectives of British artists and temporary major exhibitions of British Art. Every three years the gallery stages a Triennial exhibition in which a guest curator provides an overview of contemporary British Art; the 2003 Tate Triennial was called Days Like These. Art Now is a small changing show of a contemporary artist's work in a dedicated room.
Tate Britain is the home of the annual and controversial Turner Prize exhibition, featuring four artists selected by a jury chaired by the director of Tate Britain. This is spread out over the year with the four nominees announced in May, the show of their work opened in October and the prize itself given in December; each stage of the prize generates media coverage, there have been a number of demonstrations against the prize, notably since 2000 an annual picket by Stuckist artists. In recent years the exhibition and award ceremony have taken place at locations other than in Tate Britain: for example in Liverpool, Derry-Londonderry and Hull. Tate Britain has attempted to reach out to a different and younger audience with Late at Tate Britain on the first Friday of every month, with half-price admission to exhibitions, live music and performance art. Other public involvement has included the display of visitors', as opposed to curators', interpretation of certain artworks. Regular free tours operate on the hour, at 1.15 pm on Tuesday and Thursday short 15-minute talks are given on paintings and artistic styles.
Tate Britain is the national gallery of British art fr
Integrated Authority File
The Integrated Authority File or GND is an international authority file for the organisation of personal names, subject headings and corporate bodies from catalogues. It is used for documentation in libraries and also by archives and museums; the GND is managed by the German National Library in cooperation with various regional library networks in German-speaking Europe and other partners. The GND falls under the Creative Commons Zero licence; the GND specification provides a hierarchy of high-level entities and sub-classes, useful in library classification, an approach to unambiguous identification of single elements. It comprises an ontology intended for knowledge representation in the semantic web, available in the RDF format; the Integrated Authority File became operational in April 2012 and integrates the content of the following authority files, which have since been discontinued: Name Authority File Corporate Bodies Authority File Subject Headings Authority File Uniform Title File of the Deutsches Musikarchiv At the time of its introduction on 5 April 2012, the GND held 9,493,860 files, including 2,650,000 personalised names.
There are seven main types of GND entities: LIBRIS Virtual International Authority File Information pages about the GND from the German National Library Search via OGND Bereitstellung des ersten GND-Grundbestandes DNB, 19 April 2012 From Authority Control to Linked Authority Data Presentation given by Reinhold Heuvelmann to the ALA MARC Formats Interest Group, June 2012
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force is the United Kingdom's aerial warfare force. Formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, it is the oldest independent air force in the world. Following victory over the Central Powers in 1918 the RAF emerged as, at the time, the largest air force in the world. Since its formation, the RAF has taken a significant role in British military history. In particular, it played a large part in the Second World War where it fought its most famous campaign, the Battle of Britain; the RAF's mission is to support the objectives of the British Ministry of Defence, which are to "provide the capabilities needed to ensure the security and defence of the United Kingdom and overseas territories, including against terrorism. The RAF describes its mission statement as "... an agile and capable Air Force that, person for person, is second to none, that makes a decisive air power contribution in support of the UK Defence Mission". The mission statement is supported by the RAF's definition of air power.
Air power is defined as "the ability to project power from the air and space to influence the behaviour of people or the course of events". Today the Royal Air Force maintains an operational fleet of various types of aircraft, described by the RAF as being "leading-edge" in terms of technology; this consists of fixed-wing aircraft, including: fighter and strike aircraft, airborne early warning and control aircraft, ISTAR and SIGINT aircraft, aerial refueling aircraft and strategic and tactical transport aircraft. The majority of the RAF's rotary-wing aircraft form part of the tri-service Joint Helicopter Command in support of ground forces. Most of the RAF's aircraft and personnel are based in the UK, with many others serving on operations or at long-established overseas bases. Although the RAF is the principal British air power arm, the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm and the British Army's Army Air Corps deliver air power, integrated into the maritime and land environments. While the British were not the first to make use of heavier-than-air military aircraft, the RAF is the world's oldest independent air force: that is, the first air force to become independent of army or navy control.
Following publication of the "Smuts report" prepared by Jan Smuts the RAF was founded on 1 April 1918, with headquarters located in the former Hotel Cecil, during the First World War, by the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. At that time it was the largest air force in the world. After the war, the service was drastically cut and its inter-war years were quiet, with the RAF taking responsibility for the control of Iraq and executing a number of minor actions in other parts of the British Empire; the RAF's naval aviation branch, the Fleet Air Arm, was founded in 1924 but handed over to Admiralty control on 24 May 1939. The RAF developed the doctrine of strategic bombing which led to the construction of long-range bombers and became its main bombing strategy in the Second World War; the RAF underwent rapid expansion prior to and during the Second World War. Under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan of December 1939, the air forces of British Commonwealth countries trained and formed "Article XV squadrons" for service with RAF formations.
Many individual personnel from these countries, exiles from occupied Europe served with RAF squadrons. By the end of the war the Royal Canadian Air Force had contributed more than 30 squadrons to serve in RAF formations approximately a quarter of Bomber Command's personnel were Canadian. Additionally, the Royal Australian Air Force represented around nine percent of all RAF personnel who served in the European and Mediterranean theatres. In the Battle of Britain in 1940, the RAF defended the skies over Britain against the numerically superior German Luftwaffe. In what is the most prolonged and complicated air campaign in history, the Battle of Britain contributed to the delay and subsequent indefinite postponement of Hitler's plans for an invasion of the United Kingdom. In the House of Commons on 20 August, prompted by the ongoing efforts of the RAF, Prime Minister Winston Churchill eloquently made a speech to the nation, where he said "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few".
The largest RAF effort during the war was the strategic bombing campaign against Germany by Bomber Command. While RAF bombing of Germany began immediately upon the outbreak of war, under the leadership of Air Chief Marshal Harris, these attacks became devastating from 1942 onward as new technology and greater numbers of superior aircraft became available; the RAF adopted night-time area bombing on German cities such as Hamburg and Dresden, developed precision bombing techniques for specific operations, such as the "Dambusters" raid by No. 617 Squadron, or the Amiens prison raid known as Operation Jericho. Following victory in the Second World War, the RAF underwent significant re-organisation, as technological advances in air warfare saw the arrival of jet fighters and bombers. During the early stages of the Cold War, one of the first major operations undertaken by the Royal Air Force was in 1948 and the Berlin Airlift, codenamed Operation Plainfire. Between 26 June and the lifting of the Russian blockade of the city on 2 May, the RAF provided 17% of the total supplies delivered du
Queen's University Belfast
Queen's University Belfast is a public research university in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The university was chartered in 1845, opened in 1849 as "Queen's College, Belfast", it offers academic degrees at various levels and across a broad subject range, with over 300 degree programmes available. Its president and vice-chancellor is Ian Greer; the annual income of the institution for 2017–18 was £369.2 million of which £91.7 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £338.4 million. Queen's is a member of the Russell Group of leading research intensive universities, the Association of Commonwealth Universities, the European University Association, Universities Ireland and Universities UK; the university is associated with one Turing Award laureate. Queen's University Belfast has its roots in the Belfast Academical Institution, founded in 1810 and which remains as the Royal Belfast Academical Institution; the present university was first chartered as "Queen's College, Belfast" in 1845, when it was associated with the founded Queen's College and Queen's College, Galway, as part of the Queen's University of Ireland – founded to encourage higher education for Catholics and Presbyterians, as a counterpart to Trinity College, Dublin an Anglican institution.
Queen's College, opened in 1849. Its main building, the Lanyon Building, was designed by Sir Charles Lanyon. At its opening, it had 195 students; some early students at Queen's University Belfast took University of London examinations. The Irish Universities Act, 1908 dissolved the Royal University of Ireland, which had replaced the Queen's University of Ireland in 1879, created two separate universities: the current National University of Ireland and Queen's University of Belfast; the university was one of only eight United Kingdom universities to hold a parliamentary seat in the House of Commons at Westminster until such representation was abolished in 1950. The university was represented in the Parliament of Northern Ireland from 1920 to 1968, when graduates elected four members. On 20 June 2006, the university announced a £259 million investment programme focusing on facilities and research. One of the outcomes of this investment has been a new university library; the building has been named in honour of Sir Allen McClay, a major benefactor of Queen's University and of the Library.
In June 2010, the university announced the launch of a £7.5m Ansin international research hub with Seagate Technologies. Queen's is one of the largest employers in Northern Ireland, with a total workforce of 3,903, of whom 2,414 were members of academic, academic-related and research staff and 1,489 were administrative employees. In addition to the main campus on the southern fringes of Belfast city centre, the university has two associated university colleges, St Mary's and Stranmillis located in the west and south-west of the city respectively; these colleges offer teacher training for those who wish to pursue teaching careers and a range of degree courses, all of which are centred around a liberal arts core. While the university refers to its main site as a campus, the university's buildings are in fact spread over a number of public streets in South Belfast, principally Malone Road, University Road, University Square and Stranmillis Road, with other departments located further afield. Academic life at Queen's is organised into fifteen schools across three faculties.
The three faculties are the Faculty of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, the Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine, Health & Life Sciences. Each of the schools operates as a primary management unit of the university and the schools are the focus for education and research for their respective subject areas. School of Biological Sciences School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science School of Arts and Languages School of History, Anthropology and Politics School of Law Queen's Management School School of Mathematics and Physics School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences School of Nursing and Midwifery School of Pharmacy School of Natural and Built Environment School of Psychology School of Social Sciences and Social Work Gibson Institute- involved in education and research in the areas of sustainability, rural development, environmental management, food marketing, renewable energy, physical activity and public health Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities – established in 2012, supports interdisciplinary research in the Humanities at all levels.
On Feb 18th 2016 BBC Northern Ireland reported. Institute for Global Food Security Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice Institute of Cognition and Culture- Founded in 2004, this is one of the world's first centres for research in the cognitive science of culture, it has brought together a range of cutting-edge cognitive scientists via a series of visiting fellowships. Institute of Electronics and Information Technology - established in 2003 to commercialise world-class research and expertise in a variety of enabling digital communications technologies at the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen's University Belfast. Institute of Irish Studies- It was the first of its kind to be established in the world and is one of the lead
