1.
City of Brussels
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The City of Brussels is the largest municipality of the Brussels-Capital Region, and the de jure capital of Belgium. The City of Brussels covers most of the Regions centre, as well as northern outskirts where it borders municipalities in Flanders and it is the administrative centre of the European Union. On 1 January 2016, the City of Brussels had a population of 178,552. The total area is 32.61 km2 which gives a density of 5,475 inhabitants per square kilometre. As of 2007, there were approximately 50,000 registered non-Belgians in the City of Brussels, at first, the City of Brussels was simply defined, being the area within the second walls of Brussels, the modern-day small ring. As the city grew, the villages grew as well, eventually growing into a contiguous city. The construction of Avenue Louise was commissioned in 1847 as an avenue bordered by chestnut trees that would allow easy access to the popular recreational area of the Bois de la Cambre. However, fierce resistance to the project was put up by the town of Ixelles through whose land the avenue was supposed to run. After years of negotiations, Brussels finally annexed the narrow band of land needed for the avenue plus the Bois de la Cambre itself in 1864. That decision accounts for the unusual southeastern protrusion of the City of Brussels, the Université Libre de Bruxelles Solbosch campus is also part of the City of Brussels, partially accounting for the bulge in the southeast end. Unlike most of the municipalities in Belgium, the ones located in the Brussels-Capital Region were not merged with others during mergers occurring in 1964,1970, however, a few neighbouring municipalities have been merged into the City of Brussels, including Haren, Laken and Neder-Over-Heembeek in 1921. These comprise the northern bulge in the municipality, to the south-east is also a strip of land along Avenue Louise that was annexed from the Ixelles municipality
2.
Iranian Americans
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Iranian Americans or Persian Americans, are Americans of Iranian ancestry or people possessing Iranian and American dual citizenship. Iranian Americans are among the highest educated people in the United States and they have historically excelled in business, academia, the sciences, arts, and entertainment – but have traditionally shied away from participating in American politics and other civic activities. The Collins English Dictionary uses a variety of similar and overlapping definitions for the terms Persian and Iranian, one of the very first recorded Iranians to visit North America was Martin the Armenian, an Iranian-Armenian tobacco grower who settled in Jamestown, Virginia in 1618. Mirza Mohammad Ali, who is known as Hajj Sayyah is another Iranian who came to North America in the 1800s. He was inspired to travel around the world due to the contradiction between the ideals he read about around the world and how his fellow Iranians were treated by their leaders. He began his travel as a 23-year-old looking for knowledge and to gain perspective on the lives of others to bring back him to help Irans progress. His stay in the United States lasted 10 years, and took him across the country from New York to San Francisco. He also met with a variety of influential American figures including Ulysses S. Grant who was a president during that time, Hajj Sayyah was the first Iranian to become an American Citizen on May 26,1875. He was imprisoned upon his return to Iran for making a stand against the conditions there. He looked to the United States to protect him but to no avail, during the peak period of worldwide emigration to the United States, only 130 Iranian nationals were known to have immigrated. The first wave of Iranian migration to the United States occurred between the late 1940s to 1979, or alternatively 1977, Iranian students, most of whom had learned English as a second language in Iran, were highly desirable as new students in the United States colleges and universities. By the mid-1970s, nearly half of all Iranian students who studied abroad did so in the United States, as the Iranian economy continued to rise steadily in the 70s, it enabled many more Iranians to travel abroad freely. As reported by Bozorgmehr and Sabagh, consequently, the number of Iranian visitors to the United States also increased considerably, during the 1977–78 academic year, of about 100,000 Iranian students abroad,36,220 were enrolled in American institutions of higher learning. It is notable to mention that the pattern of Iranian migration during this phase usually only involved individuals- not whole families. However, Due to the events that followed very soon afterwards in the 1979 Revolution, matters changed. The second phase of Iranian migration began immediately before and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the overthrow of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and became significant in the early 1980s. As Prof. Ronald H. Bayor adds, The 1979 Revolution and the 1980–88 war with Iraq transformed Irans class structure, politically, socially, and economically. During and after the revolution, most students did not return to Iran, Many students who graduated abroad after the revolution also did not return, due to ruling clergys repression
3.
Futures studies
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Futures studies is the study of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures and the worldviews and myths that underlie them. There is a debate as to whether this discipline is an art or science, in general, it can be considered as a branch of the social sciences and parallel to the field of history. History studies the past, futures studies considers the future, Futures studies seeks to understand what is likely to continue and what could plausibly change. Part of the discipline thus seeks a systematic and pattern-based understanding of past and present, unlike the physical sciences where a narrower, more specified system is studied, futures studies concerns a much bigger and more complex world system. The methodology and knowledge are much less proven as compared to science or even social science like sociology, economics. Futures studies is a field, studying yesterdays and todays changes. It includes analyzing the sources, patterns, and causes of change and stability in an attempt to develop foresight, around the world the field is variously referred to as futures studies, strategic foresight, futuristics, futures thinking, futuring, and futurology. Futures studies and strategic foresight are the fields most commonly used terms in the English-speaking world. Foresight was the term and was first used in this sense by H. G. Wells in 1932. Futurology is a common in encyclopedias, though it is used almost exclusively by nonpractitioners today. Futurology is defined as the study of the future, the term was coined by German professor Ossip K. Flechtheim in the mid-1940s, who proposed it as a new branch of knowledge that would include a new science of probability. Three factors usually distinguish futures studies from the conducted by other disciplines. First, futures studies often examines not only possible but also probable, preferable, third, futures studies challenges and unpacks the assumptions behind dominant and contending views of the future. The future thus is not empty but fraught with hidden assumptions, for example, many people expect the collapse of the Earths ecosystem in the near future, while others believe the current ecosystem will survive indefinitely. A foresight approach would seek to analyze and highlight the assumptions underpinning such views and it is in this regard, that futures studies evolves from an academic exercise to a more traditional business-like practice, looking to better prepare organizations for the future. Futures studies does not generally focus on short term such as interest rates over the next business cycle. Most strategic planning, which develops operational plans for preferred futures with time horizons of one to three years, is not considered futures. Plans and strategies with longer time horizons that specifically attempt to anticipate future events are definitely part of the field
4.
Transhumanism
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Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the ethics of using such technologies. The transhumanist philosophies of Max More and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner have been influenced strongly by Nietzschean thinking, by way of contrast, The Transhumanist Declaration. advocates the well-being of all sentience. Fundamental ideas of transhumanism were first advanced in 1923 by the British geneticist J. B. S, in particular, he was interested in the development of the science of eugenics, ectogenesis, and the application of genetics to improve human characteristics, such as health and intelligence. His article inspired academic and popular interest and these ideas have been common transhumanist themes ever since. The biologist Julian Huxley is generally regarded as the founder of transhumanism, the term itself, however, derives from an earlier 1940 paper by the Canadian philosopher W. D. Lighthall. Huxleys definition differs, albeit not substantially, from the one commonly in use since the 1980s, the ideas raised by these thinkers were explored in the science fiction of the 1960s, notably in Arthur C. Clarkes 2001, A Space Odyssey, in which an alien artifact grants transcendent power to its wielder, japanese Metabolist architects produced a manifesto in 1960 which outlined goals to encourage active metabolic development of our society through design and technology. What I think will be known by all the people, there is no more individual consciousness, only the will of mankind as a whole. The concept of the singularity, or the ultra-rapid advent of superhuman intelligence, was first proposed by the British cryptologist I. J. Good in 1965, Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the activities of any man however clever. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, computer scientist Marvin Minsky wrote on relationships between human and artificial intelligence beginning in the 1960s. The coalescence of an identifiable transhumanist movement began in the last decades of the 20th century, in 1972, Robert Ettinger contributed to the conceptualization of transhumanity in his book Man into Superman. FM-2030 published the Upwingers Manifesto in 1973, the first self-described transhumanists met formally in the early 1980s at the University of California, Los Angeles, which became the main center of transhumanist thought. Here, FM-2030 lectured on his Third Way futurist ideology, FM-2030 and Vita-More soon began holding gatherings for transhumanists in Los Angeles, which included students from FM-2030s courses and audiences from Vita-Mores artistic productions. In 1982, Vita-More authored the Transhumanist Arts Statement and, six years later, produced the cable TV show TransCentury Update on transhumanity, a program which reached over 100,000 viewers. In 1986, Eric Drexler published Engines of Creation, The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, which discussed the prospects for nanotechnology and molecular assemblers, and founded the Foresight Institute. As the first non-profit organization to research, advocate for, and perform cryonics, in 1988, the first issue of Extropy Magazine was published by Max More and Tom Morrow. Transhumanism shares many elements of humanism, including a respect for reason and science, a commitment to progress, Transhumanism differs from humanism in recognizing and anticipating the radical alterations in the nature and possibilities of our lives resulting from various sciences and technologies
5.
Persian alphabet
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The Persian alphabet or Perso-Arabic alphabet is a writing system based on the Arabic script and used for the Persian language. It has four more than the Arabic alphabet, پ, چ, ژ. The Persian script is an abjad and is exclusively written cursively and that is, the majority of the letters in a word connect to each other. This is also implemented on computers, whenever the Persian alphabet is typed, the computer automatically connects the letters to each other. Words are written right to left. Also, vowels are underrepresented in writing, see below for details, the replacement of the Pahlavi scripts with the Persian alphabet in order to write the Persian language was done by the Tahirid dynasty in ninth century Greater Khorasan. Below are the 32 letters of the modern Persian alphabet, since the script is cursive, the appearance of a letter changes depending on its position, isolated, initial, medial, and final of a word. The names of the letter are mostly the ones used in Arabic, the only ambiguous name is he, which is used for both ﺡ and ه. For clarification, these are often called ḥe-ye jimi and he-ye do-češm, respectively. Letters which do not link to a following letter Seven letters – و, ژ, ﺯ, ﺭ, ﺫ, ﺩ, ﺍ – do not connect to a letter as the rest of the letters of the alphabet do. These seven letters have the form in isolated and initial position. For example, when the letter ا alef is at the beginning of a such as اینجا injā. Persian script has adopted a subset of Arabic diacritics which consists of zabar /æ/, zir /e/, other Arabic diacritics may be seen in Arabic loan-words. The following are not actual letters but different orthographical shapes for letters, and in the case of the lām alef, as to ﺀ hamze, it has only a single graphic, since it is never tied to a preceding or following letter. However, it is seated on a vāv, ye or alef. Technically, hamze is not a letter but a diacritic, although at first glance they may seem similar, there are many differences in the way the different languages use the alphabets. For example, similar words are written differently in Persian and Arabic, vowel notation is simple but its history is complicated. Classical Arabic has a length distinction, in writing, long vowels are normally written ambiguously by letters known as matres lectionis while short ones are normally omitted entirely
6.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
7.
Persian language
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Persian, also known by its endonym Farsi, is one of the Western Iranian languages within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan and it is mostly written in the Persian alphabet, a modified variant of the Arabic script. Its grammar is similar to that of many contemporary European languages, Persian gets its name from its origin at the capital of the Achaemenid Empire, Persis, hence the name Persian. A Persian-speaking person may be referred to as Persophone, there are approximately 110 million Persian speakers worldwide, with the language holding official status in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. For centuries, Persian has also been a cultural language in other regions of Western Asia, Central Asia. It also exerted influence on Arabic, particularly Bahrani Arabic. Persian is one of the Western Iranian languages within the Indo-European family, other Western Iranian languages are the Kurdish languages, Gilaki, Mazanderani, Talysh, and Balochi. Persian is classified as a member of the Southwestern subgroup within Western Iranian along with Lari, Kumzari, in Persian, the language is known by several names, Western Persian, Parsi or Farsi has been the name used by all native speakers until the 20th century. Since the latter decades of the 20th century, for reasons, in English. Tajiki is the variety of Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan by the Tajiks, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term Persian as a language name is first attested in English in the mid-16th century. Native Iranian Persian speakers call it Fārsi, Farsi is the Arabicized form of Pārsi, subsequent to Muslim conquest of Persia, due to a lack of the phoneme /p/ in Standard Arabic. The origin of the name Farsi and the place of origin of the language which is Fars Province is the Arabicized form of Pārs, in English, this language has historically been known as Persian, though Farsi has also gained some currency. Farsi is encountered in some literature as a name for the language. In modern English the word Farsi refers to the language while Parsi describes Zoroastrians, some Persian language scholars such as Ehsan Yarshater, editor of Encyclopædia Iranica, and University of Arizona professor Kamran Talattof, have also rejected the usage of Farsi in their articles. The international language-encoding standard ISO 639-1 uses the code fa, as its system is mostly based on the local names. The more detailed standard ISO 639-3 uses the name Persian for the dialect continuum spoken across Iran and Afghanistan and this consists of the individual languages Dari and Iranian Persian. Currently, Voice of America, BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty also includes a Tajik service and an Afghan service. This is also the case for the American Association of Teachers of Persian, The Centre for Promotion of Persian Language and Literature, Persian is an Iranian language belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages
8.
Foreign relations of Iran
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Foreign relations of Iran refers to inter-governmental relationships between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other countries. Geography is a significant factor in informing Irans foreign policy. Irans bilateral dealings are accordingly sometimes confused and contradictory, Iran currently maintains full diplomatic relations with 97 countries worldwide. It is entirely plausible that the BBC did indeed help hasten revolutionary events, in Khomeinis own words, We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry There is no God but God resounds over the whole world, the nerve centre of the revolutionary crusade, operational since shortly after the 1979 revolution, was located in downtown Tehran and known to outsiders as the Taleghani Centre. These groups came under the umbrella of the Council for the Islamic Revolution, which was supervised by Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, most of the councils members were clerics, but they also reportedly included advisors from the Syrian and Libyan intelligence agencies. The council apparently received more than $1 billion annually in contributions from the faithful in other countries, for example, the Islamic Republic expressed its opinion of Egypts secular government by naming a street in Tehran after Egyptian President Anwar Sadats killer, Khalid al-Istanbuli. Arab and other Muslim volunteers who came to Iran were trained in camps run by the Revolutionary Guards. There were three primary bases in Tehran, and others in Ahvaz, Isfahan, Qom, Shiraz, and Mashad, nations with strong fundamentalist movements, such as Egypt and Algeria, also began to mistrust Iran. With the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Iran was thought to be supporting the creation of the Hizballah organization, furthermore, Iran went on to oppose the Arab–Israeli peace process, because it saw Israel as an illegal country. Relations with Iraq had never been historically, however, they took a turn for the worse in 1980. The stated reason for Iraqs invasion was the sovereignty over the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Iran demanded the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Iranian territory and the return to the status quo ante for the Shatt al-Arab and this period saw Iran become even more isolated, with virtually no allies. Exhausted by the war, Iran signed UN Security Council Resolution 598 in July 1988, after the United States, the ceasefire resulting from the UN resolution was implemented on 20 August 1988. Neither nation had any real gains in the war, which left one million dead and had a dramatic effect on the countrys foreign policy. From this point on, the Islamic Republic recognized that it had no choice but to moderate its radical approach and this was the beginning of what Anoushiravan Ehteshami calls the reorientation phase of Iranian foreign policy. Like other revolutionary states, practical considerations have led the Islamic Republic to inconsistency. In this regard the Islamic Republic resembles another revolutionary state, the old Soviet Union, since the end of the Iran–Iraq War, Irans new foreign policy has had a dramatic effect on its global standing
