Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of the fantastic, it features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety and absurdity, his best known works include "Die Verwandlung", Der Process, Das Schloss. The term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe situations like those found in his writing. Kafka was born into a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today the capital of the Czech Republic, he trained as a lawyer and after completing his legal education was employed full-time by an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship.

He became engaged to several women but never married. He died in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis. Few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime: the story collections Betrachtung and Ein Landarzt, individual stories were published in literary magazines but received little public attention. In his will, Kafka instructed his executor and friend Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works, including his novels Der Process, Das Schloss and Der Verschollene, but Brod ignored these instructions, his work has influenced a vast range of writers, critics and philosophers during the 20th and 21st centuries. Kafka was born near the Old Town Square in Prague part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his family were German-speaking middle-class Ashkenazi Jews. His father, Hermann Kafka, was the fourth child of Jakob Kafka, a shochet or ritual slaughterer in Osek, a Czech village with a large Jewish population located near Strakonice in southern Bohemia. Hermann brought the Kafka family to Prague.

After working as a travelling sales representative, he became a fashion retailer who employed up to 15 people and used the image of a jackdaw as his business logo. Kafka's mother, was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a prosperous retail merchant in Poděbrady, was better educated than her husband. Kafka's parents spoke a German influenced by Yiddish, sometimes pejoratively called Mauscheldeutsch, but, as the German language was considered the vehicle of social mobility, they encouraged their children to speak Standard German. Hermann and Julie had six children. Franz's two brothers and Heinrich, died in infancy before Franz was seven. All three died during the Holocaust of World War II. Valli was deported to the Łódź Ghetto in occupied Poland in 1942, but, the last documentation of her. Ottilie was Kafka's favourite sister. Hermann is described by the biographer Stanley Corngold as a "huge, overbearing businessman" and by Franz Kafka as "a true Kafka in strength, appetite, loudness of voice, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, presence of mind, knowledge of human nature".

On business days, both parents were absent from the home, with Julie Kafka working as many as 12 hours each day helping to manage the family business. Kafka's childhood was somewhat lonely, the children were reared by a series of governesses and servants. Kafka's troubled relationship with his father is evident in his Brief an den Vater of more than 100 pages, in which he complains of being profoundly affected by his father's authoritarian and demanding character; the dominating figure of Kafka's father had a significant influence on Kafka's writing. The Kafka family had a servant girl living with them in a cramped apartment. Franz's room was cold. In November 1913 the family moved into a bigger apartment, although Ellie and Valli had married and moved out of the first apartment. In early August 1914, just after World War I began, the sisters did not know where their husbands were in the military and moved back in with the family in this larger apartment. Both Ellie and Valli had children. Franz at age 31 moved into Valli's former apartment, quiet by contrast, lived by himself for the first time.

From 1889 to 1893, Kafka attended the Deutsche Knabenschule German boys' elementary school at the Masný trh/Fleischmarkt, now known as Masná Street. His Jewish education ended with his bar mitzvah celebration at the age of 13. Kafka never enjoyed attending the synagogue and went with his father only on four high holidays a year. After leaving elementary school in 1893, Kafka was admitted to the rigorous classics-oriented state gymnasium, Altstädter Deutsches Gymnasium, an academic secondary school at Old Town Square, within the Kinský Palace. German was the language of instruction, but Kafka spoke and wrote in Czech, he studied the latter at the gymnasium for eight years. Although Kafka received compliments for his Czech, he never considered himself fluent in Czech, though he spoke German with a Czech accent, he completed his Matura exams in 1901. Admitted to the Deutsche Karl-Ferdinands-Universität of Prague in 1901, Kafka b

Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff as a spin-off of Dalmo-Victor; the name AMPEX is a portmanteau, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence. Today, Ampex operates as Ampex Data Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Delta Information Systems, consists of two business units; the Silicon Valley unit, known internally as Ampex Data Systems, manufactures ruggedized, high-capacity, high-performance digital data storage systems capable of functioning in harsh environments on land, in the air, at sea, in space. The Colorado Springs, Colorado unit, referred to as Ampex Intelligent Systems, serves as a laboratory and hub for the company's line of industrial control system cyber security products and services and its artificial intelligence/machine learning technology, available across all of the company's products. Ampex's first great success was a line of reel-to-reel tape recorders developed from the German wartime Magnetophon system at the behest of Bing Crosby.

Ampex became a leader in audio tape technology, developing many of the analog recording formats for both music and movies that remained in use into the 1990s. Starting in the 1950s, the company began developing video tape recorders, introduced the helical scan concept that make home video players possible, they introduced multi-track recording, slow-motion and instant playback television, a host of other advances. Ampex's tape business was rendered obsolete during the 1990s, the company turned to digital storage products. Ampex moved into digital storage for DoD Flight Test Instrumentation with the introduction of the first, true all digital flight test recorder. Ampex supports numerous major DoD programs with the US Air Force, US Army, US Marines, US Navy and other government entities. Ampex works with all major DoD primes and integrators including Boeing, General Atomics, Northrop and many others; the new Ampex is attempting to do more with the data stored on its network attached storage devices.

This includes adding advanced encryption for more secure data storage. Russian-American inventor Alexander Matthew Poniatoff established the company in San Carlos, California, in 1944 as the Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company; the company name came from his initials plus "ex" to avoid using the name AMP in use. During World War II, Ampex was a subcontractor to Dalmo-Victor, manufacturing high quality electric motors and generators for radars that used alnico 5 magnets from General Electric. Ampex was set up in an abandoned loft-space above the Dalmo-Victor plant. Near the end of the war, while serving in the U. S. Army Signal Corps, Major Jack Mullin was assigned to investigate German radio and electronics experiments, he discovered the Magnetophons with AC biasing on a trip to Radio Frankfurt. The device produced much better fidelity than shellac records; the technological processes in tape recording and equipment developed by German companies before and during the 1939-45 War had copyrights which were voided after Germany's 1945 surrender and defeat.

Mullin acquired two Magnetophon recorders and 50 reels of BASF Type L tape, brought them to America, where he produced modified versions. He demonstrated them to the Institute of Radio Engineers in San Francisco on May 16, 1946. Bing Crosby, a big star on radio at the time, was receptive to the idea of pre-recording his radio programs, he disliked the regimentation of live broadcasts, much preferred the relaxed atmosphere of the recording studio. He had asked the NBC network to let him pre-record his 1944-45 series on transcription discs, but the network refused. In June 1947, pitching the technology to the major Hollywood movie studios, got the chance to demonstrate his modified tape recorders to Crosby; when Crosby heard a demonstration of Mullin's tape recorders, he saw the potential of the new technology and commissioned Mullin to prepare a test recording of his radio show. Ampex was finishing its prototype of the Model 200 tape recorder, Mullin used the first two models as soon as they were built.

After a successful test broadcast, ABC agreed to allow Crosby to pre-record his shows on tape. Crosby appointed Mullin as his chief engineer and placed an order for $50,000 worth of the new recorders so that Ampex could develop a commercial production model from the prototypes. Crosby Enterprises was Ampex's West Coast representative until 1957; the company's first tape recorder, the Ampex Model 200, was first shipped in April 1948. The first two units, serial numbers 1 and 2, were used to record Bing Crosby's show; the American Broadcasting Company used these recorders along with 3M Scotch 111 gamma ferric oxide coated acetate tape for the first-ever U. S. delayed radio broadcast of Bing Crosby's Philco Radio Time. Ampex tape recorders revolutionized the radio and recording industries because of their superior audio quality and ease of operation over audio disk cutting lathes. During the early 1950s, Ampex began marketing one- and two-track machines using 1⁄4-inch tape; the line soon expanded into three- and four-track models usin

Johannes Bøe was a Norwegian archaeologist. In 1921, Bøe received his candidatus philologiæ degree with the thesis Norske guldfund fra folkevandringstiden. In 1931 he received his doctorate with the dissertation Jernalderens keramikk i Norge. In 1921 he was appointed a researcher at the University Museum of Bergen, he was a research professor at the same institution. Bøe was distinguished by his exceptionally rich scholarly production, ranging from the early Stone Age to the Iron Age, his best-known work, alongside his doctoral dissertation, is Le Finmarkien: Les origines de la civilisation dans l'extreme-nord de l'Europe, which he coauthored with Anders Nummedal and in which they established the Komsa culture as having its own status in the Norwegian Stone Age. Bøe was born in Ringsaker, the son of John O. Bøe and Marie Nilsdatter Bjerke, his father was a farmer at the Ottersrud farm. Bøe was the father of the art historian Alf Bøe. Fridtjof Nansen Prize for Outstanding Research, 1932, for his work on Iron Age pottery in Norway