The groat is the traditional name of a long-defunct English and Irish silver coin worth four pence, a Scottish coin, worth fourpence, with issues being valued at eightpence and one shilling. The name has been applied to any thick or large coin, such as the Groschen, a silver coin issued by Tyrol in 1271 and Venice in the 13th century, the first of this general size to circulate in the Holy Roman Empire and other parts of Europe; the immediate ancestor to the groat was the French gros tournois or groat of Tours, known as the groot in the Netherlands. The name groat refers to a range of other European coins such as those of the Italian peninsula known as a grosso including the grosso of Venice and the Kraków grosz. Marco Polo referred to the groat in recounts of his travels to East Asia when describing the currencies of the Yuan Empire, his descriptions were based on the conversion of 1 bezant = 133 1⁄3 tornesel. It was after the French silver coin had circulated in England that an English groat was first minted under King Edward I.

Scots groats were not issued until the reign of David II. Scots groats were also worth fourpence, but issues were valued at eightpence and a shilling. Irish groats were minted first in 1425 and the last ones were minted under the reign of Elizabeth I of England. There were two more issues, both emergency coinage. While speaking, the English groat should have contained four pennyweights or 96 grains of sterling silver, the first ones issued weighed 89 grains and issues became progressively lighter; the weight was reduced to 72 grains under Edward III, 60 grains under Henry IV, 48 grains under Edward IV. From 1544 to 1560 the silver fineness was less than sterling, after the 1561 issue they were not issued for circulation again for about a hundred years. From the reigns of Charles II to George III, groats were issued on an irregular basis for general circulation, the only years of mintage after 1786 being in 1792, 1795, 1800. After this the only circulating issues were from 1836 to 1855, with proofs known from 1857 and 1862, a colonial issue of 1888.

These last coins had the weight further reduced to about 27 grains and were the same diameter as the silver threepenny pieces of the day although thicker. They had Britannia on the reverse, while all other silver fourpenny pieces since the reign of William and Mary have had a crowned numeral "4" as the reverse, including the silver fourpenny Maundy money coins of the present; some groats continued to circulate in Scotland until the 20th century. At times in the past, silver twopenny coins have been called "half-groats"; the groat ceased to be minted in the United Kingdom in 1856, but in 1888 a special request was made for a colonial variety to be minted for use in British Guiana and the British West Indies. The groat remained in circulation in British Guiana right up until that territory adopted the decimal system in 1955. Groats are still issued in sets of Maundy Coinage. In the 1600s and 1700s, chaplains were employed in English Navy ships of war by the captain, paid out of a groat per month deducted from the wages of the seamen.

The Navy's wages did not rise between 1653 and 1797, during which time the ordinary seaman was paid 19 shillings, as was the chaplain. The word "groat" has entered into a number of English and Scottish expressions, many of them now archaic. In the north of England, there is the saying "Blood without groats is nothing" meaning "family without fortune is worthless." The allusion is to black pudding, which consists chiefly of blood and oats formed into a sausage and cut into slices. "Not worth a groat" is an old saying meaning "not worth a penny", i.e. worthless. Benjamin Franklin, in his book, Necessary Hints gives the following thrifty advice: He that spends a groat a day idly, spends idly above six pounds a year. Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin features the following riddle: Riddle me, riddle me, rot-tot-tote! A little wee man in a red red coat! A staff in his hand, a stone in his throat; the answer is "a cherry."In The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, a character recounts the paying of groats to people who held her underwater to determine if she was a witch: And Mistress Jemima's father gives them each a silver groat to hold the stool down under the foul green water for a long time, to see if I'd choke on it.

According to Hawkins' History of the Silver Coins of England, groats were known as "Joeys", so called from Joseph Hume, M. P. who recommended the coinage for the sake of paying short cab-fares, etc. This refers to the Victorian fourpenny piece; the mention of cab fares is related to the fact that the standard minimum was fourpence, so many passengers paid with a sixpenny piece, allowing the cabbie to keep the twopence change as a tip. The slang name "Joey" was transferred to the silver threepenny pieces in use in the first third of the twentieth century. In A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Sara Crewe picks up a fourpenny piece from the street and uses it to buy buns; the original story was set in 1888. John o' Groats, a place name in the north of Scotland, is not derived from "groat" but is a corruption of "Jan de Groot", the name of a Dutchman who migrated there in the reign of James IV; the monetary unit of Federation, the forerunner of the active Federation II text-based roleplaying game, was the groat.

Terry Pratchett's first book in the Moist von Lipwig series of novels, Going Postal, int

ND4S is a free, open-source extension of the Scala programming language operating on the Java Virtual Machine – though it is compatible with both Java and Clojure. ND4S is a scientific computing library for linear algebra and matrix manipulation in a production environment, integrating with Hadoop and Spark to work with distributed GPUs, it supports n-dimensional arrays for JVM-based languages. ND4S has been developed by the group in San Francisco that built Deeplearning4j, led by Adam Gibson, it was created under an Apache Software Foundation license. ND4S's operations include distributed parallel versions, they can process massive amounts of data. Matrix manipulation occurs in parallel on GPUs or CPUs in the cloud, can work within Spark or Hadoop clusters. Benchmarks show that ND4S runs twice as fast as NumPy on large matrices. NumPy SciPy Official website

A Place I Go is the second studio album from Tyler James, released on 29 October 2012. The album serves as a follow up to the debut album, The Unlikely Lad and marks James' second full-length release with Island Records; the release of A Place I Go was preceded by the single "Single Tear" on 21 October 2012. The album contains James' version of Steve Winwood's "Higher Love", performed live by James on The Voice UK and featured on the show's compilation album; the album received mixed reviews, peaked at number 47 on the UK Albums Chart the week of its release. James confirmed in an interview with Digital Spy that he had written the album with Fraser T Smith and Guy Chambers. On his collaborations, he expressed. He's someone. I have so much respect for the craft of songwriting, so working with people like Fraser and Guy Chambers, there's so much I can learn from them."James' mentor on The Voice UK, will.i.am has overseen the project. James stated"... the thing with will is. I'll send he'll let me know what he thinks.

I went for The Voice and didn't think about it, to be honest. It wasn't a massive decision. I wouldn't go for something like that because I'd be too scared; the chances of it f**king up are so great, so now when I look back at getting to the final I'm like,'That was f**king lucky'. I hadn't done much for four years leading up to that and that part of my life was quite sad and dramatic. So all of these songs coming out now reflects that. There is a part of my brain that's saying,'Ooh, you better write something a bit more uptempo and happy', but if that's where your head's at, that's what you've got to do." The album received mixed reviews, with Virgin Media awarding the album 3 out of 5 stars, saying "the album suffers from over-earnestness and a samey pace" but is "an interesting real-deal of a debut", Digital Spy giving the album 2 out of 5 stars, calling the album a "sluggish set which sadly falls short of expectations"