The Harajuku Lovers Tour was the first solo concert tour of American recording artist Gwen Stefani. The tour began through October to November 2005. Angel. Music. Baby.. Although Stefani embarked on multiple tours with her band No Doubt, she opted not to participate in a tour to promote her album, an attitude that the singer abandoned due to the commercial success of Love. Angel. Music. Baby; the tour consisted of only one leg, which encompassed a three-month-long series of performances that visited cities throughout the United States and Canada. Stefani recruited hip hop group The Black Eyed Peas, rapper M. I. A. and singer Ciara to accompany her as opening acts for her endeavors. The tour produced varying responses from contemporary critics, who despite praising Stefani's vocals, were critical of other aspects of the show such as its musical material. A video album, titled Harajuku Lovers Live, was released in DVD format in conjunction with her 2006 album The Sweet Escape and features the singer performing at the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, Stefani's birthplace.

According to Billboard, the tour grossed $22 million from which 20 sold-out. Stefani announced a tour to support her first solo studio album Love. Angel. Music. Baby. on June 27, 2005, giving details of sixteen dates from October 16 to November 10. The announcement on June 27 included the fact that hip hop group The Black Eyed Peas, who are signed to Interscope Records, would be the opening act for all the announced dates except November 3; the group, who were backing their album Monkey Business, ended up touring with Stefani until November 14. On August 8, it was announced that singer-songwriter and rapper M. I. A. would take over as the opening act from November 16 to November 25, although it wasn't until August 17 that the extra dates from November 11 to November 25 were added to the tour. M. I. A. Toured with Stefani, backing her album Arular, until December 1. On September 29, the final set of dates, November 26 to December 21, were added to the tour and it was announced that the third and final opening act for Stefani's tour would be singer Ciara, backing her album Goodies, from December 3 to December 21.

Stefani did not intend to tour to support the album, responding "What tour?" to a question from MTV News in December 2004 regarding a possible tour. She mentioned several times that she had not intended to tour in support of the album, referring to her "illegal tour" and apologizing for her breaking her promise not to tour on stage at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota on November 14 and admitting "I just wanted to make a record. I didn't want to tour, I was too tired you guys kept buying the record, I had to come out and see you guys" on stage at Winnipeg on November 16. In a September interview with MTV News, Stefani said of the tour: "I'm looking forward to it, it's going to be unbelievable. I would love to try to roll a little bit of'Orange County Girl' in there. We'll see. Anything can happen in rehearsals. I don't know how long the show can be right now." Stefani opened the show with the song "Harajuku Girls", an ode to Harajuku, the fashion district of Tokyo, Japan. She appeared on stage wearing a tiara and baby doll outfit, sitting in the red velvet and gold throne from the cover of the album. and surrounded by her backing dancers called the Harajuku Girls, while video images of Harajuku itself played on screens behind her.

Her second song was the first single from the album, "What You Waiting For?", which she began as a ballad before bringing it up to its usual pace. Stefani and the Harajuku Girls left the stage to change into one-piece bathing suits while her band continued to play, before returning to perform "The Real Thing". A group of four breakdancers came on stage to perform while Stefani left the stage again to change into a black-and-white leather tracksuit. For the next song, the album's sixth single "Crash", the audience was divided into male and female halves and, as images of a car hood bouncing to the beat were broadcast, each half took turns to sing the lyric "back it up, back it up". Stefani performed the fourth single from the album, "Luxurious". Stefani changed outfits again into a pair of black hot pants to perform "Rich Girl", the album's second single, while walking along a catwalk into the crowd and giving fans high-fives, she sang "Danger Zone" and "Long Way to Go", both intimate songs, before performing two new songs back-to-back: "Wind It Up", which would become the first single from her second album The Sweet Escape, "Orange County Girl".

"Wind It Up" was performed with a carnival vibe and "Orange County Girl" was accompanied by a video montage of childhood photos of Stefani and images of items mentioned in the song. She changed into a silver sequinned cocktail dress for the fourth single from her first album, "Cool". In early performances of the show, Stefani's next song was "Hollaback Girl", the album's third and best-selling single, performed in a drumming costume and singing with the audience; this was followed by an encore of "Serious" and "Bubble Pop Electric", for which Stefani was brought out in a stretcher by the Harajuku Girls. However, in performances, "Hollaback Girl" was saved for the encore and preceded by the two other songs. Critics were divided with the Harajuku Lovers Tour. Patrick MacDonald of the Seattle Times, while applauding Stefani's song-writing efforts and the show's "frothy fun" antics, reprimanded the singer's dancing and limited material, given that she performed only twelve songs from Love. Angel.

Music. Baby. and two from The Sweet Escape but none from previous work with her band No Doubt. In regards to the musical selection, MacDonald conclu

Wilson McLean is a Scottish illustrator and artist. He has illustrated in the field of advertising, but has provided cover art for music albums, sports magazines, a children's book, other commercial endeavors. Wilson McLean began his career in a London silkscreen studio at fifteen years of age and to date has won most major illustrator awards in the United States. Born in Scotland, he moved to London at the age of ten where he attended St. Martins and the Central School at night while working on the staff of magazines and design studios; this exposed him to the work of American illustrators as well as painters and convinced him that he would go to America. Two years of national service stopped him painting for that period to time, he went back to the design studios in Fleet Street for a few years doing little of interest, but working on his own drawings at night. At twenty-three, Wilson moved to Copenhagen and the beginning of a freelance career, he married a Norwegian woman, after a year they moved to Spain home to London where he established himself, working with publishing houses, advertising agencies and magazines.

He decided the time was right for New York. 1965 was the year. The first week an agent took him on and he got his first commission from The Saturday Evening Post which he did in a borrowed studio, followed by three more magazine jobs which he took back to London. Returning in 1966 with wife and child, he moved to the Upper West Side thinking this would continue as before, but although this was a creative time in New York and there was no shortage of work in general, McLean experienced several lean years before gaining a reputation, he realized he did not yet have a signature style and point of view and the competition was fierce, so after a couple of years or so experimenting with different mediums and observing more concept oriented pictures he accomplished a breakthrough in 1973 with important work for Look Magazine, Sports Illustrated and Playboy. His diligence paid off and he worked for a wide variety of clients from advertising, movie posters, record covers, Time Magazine covers, book jackets, annual reports, etc.

McLean’s awards include several silver and gold medals at the Art Directors Club of New York plus the prestigious Clio for television commercials for Eastern Airlines. He won nine silver and four gold medals over the years at the Society of Illustrators in NY and in 1980 the Hamilton King Award for best in show, gold that same year at the Los Angeles Art Directors Show. In 1974 he met and married Rosemary Howard, an ex-model turned photographer, they shared a loft/studio in the Flatiron District of Manhattan and split their time between Southampton and NYC. The Society of Illustrators Gallery in NYC gave him a one-man show in 1978 and a few years he went to Zurich two summers running to work on lithographs ending in a show of work there in 1984. During the years he has participated in other parts of the country, he is represented at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C. as well as the National Air and Space Museum in D. C. and in the London Transport Museum’s permanent poster collection.

In 1985, to commemorate European Music Year, the Royal Mail commissioned him to design and illustrate five stamps for a special edition of British composers, he designed a set of four stamps for the US mail illustrating the Broadway musical Oklahoma! Around that same time. McLean contributed to an exhibition and book for the United Nations environmental program entitled Art for Survival. A children's book called If The Earth.. were a few feet in diameter published by the Greenwich Workshop Press which features eighteen paintings is his only experience with that genre. In the year 2000, for the Millennium, the United Kingdom’s postal service commissioned a stamp, one of a number produced by such people as David Hockney and Eduardo Paolozzi, his teaching has included Syracuse University, The School of Visual Arts, guest workshops at Savannah College of Art and Design, Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida, as well as workshops throughout the United States. In 2000 he and his wife moved to New York from Long Island and Manhattan.

Mclean now lives full-time in Hurley, NY In 2007, McLean had a show of work at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York. And in 2009 a show of Italian landscapes at the Conrad L. Mallett Gallery in Connecticut; the Society of Illustrators in 2010 inducted McLean into the Hall of Fame. In 2011 McLean designed and painted the Earth Day poster which the State Department in Washington, D. C. produces each year. In 2011 he was interviewed for the National Endowment for the Arts Art Works blog

In soil science, pedotransfer functions are predictive functions of certain soil properties using data from soil surveys. The term pedotransfer function was coined by Johan Bouma as translating data we have into what we need; the most available data come from soil survey, such as field morphology, soil texture, structure and pH. Pedotransfer functions add value to this basic information by translating them into estimates of other more laborious and expensively determined soil properties; these functions fill the gap between the available soil data and the properties which are more useful or required for a particular model or quality assessment. Pedotransfer functions utilize various regression analysis and data mining techniques to extract rules associating basic soil properties with more difficult to measure properties. Although not formally recognized and named until 1989, the concept of the pedotransfer function has long been applied to estimate soil properties that are difficult to determine.

Many soil science agencies have their own rule of thumb for estimating difficult-to-measure soil properties. Because of the particular difficulty, cost of measurement, availability of large databases, the most comprehensive research in developing PTFs has been for the estimation of water retention curve and hydraulic conductivity; the first PTF came from the study of Lyman McLane. They determined the wilting coefficient, defined as percentage water content of a soil when the plants growing in that soil are first reduced to a wilted condition from which they cannot recover in an saturated atmosphere without the addition of water to the soil, as a function of particle-size: Wilting coefficient = 0.01 sand + 0.12 silt + 0.57 clayWith the introduction of the field capacity and permanent wilting point concepts by Frank Veihmeyer and Arthur Hendricksen, research during the period 1950-1980 attempted to correlate particle-size distribution, bulk density and organic matter content with water content at field capacity, permanent wilting point, available water capacity.

In the 1960s various papers dealt with the estimation of FC, PWP, AWC, notably in a series of papers by Salter and Williams. They explored relationships between texture classes and available water capacity, which are now known as class PTFs, they developed functions relating the particle-size distribution to AWC, now known as continuous PTFs. They asserted that their functions could predict AWC to a mean accuracy of 16%. In the 1970s more comprehensive research using large databases was developed. A good example is the study by Hall et al. from soil in England and Wales. In the USA, Gupta and Larson developed 12 functions relating particle-size distribution and organic matter content to water content at potentials ranging from -4 kPa to -1500 kPa. With the flourishing development of models describing soil hydraulic properties and computer modelling of soil-water and solute transport, the need for hydraulic properties as inputs to these models became more evident. Clapp and Hornberger derived average values for the parameters of a power-function water retention curve and saturated hydraulic conductivity for different texture classes.

In the first research of its kind, Bloemen derived empirical equations relating parameters of the Brooks and Corey hydraulic model to particle-size distribution. Jurgen Lamp and Kneib from Germany introduced the term pedofunction, while Bouma and van Lanen used the term transfer function. To avoid confusion with the term transfer function used in soil physics and in many other disciplines, Johan Bouma called it pedotransfer function.. Since the development of hydraulic PTFs has become a boom research topic, first in the US and Europe, South America and all over the world. Although most PTFs have been developed to predict soil hydraulic properties, they are not restricted to hydraulic properties. PTFs for estimating soil physical, mechanical and biological properties have been developed. There are several available programs that aid determining hydraulic properties of soils using pedotransfer functions, among them are SOILPAR – By Acutis and Donatelli ROSETTA – By Schaap et al. of the USDA, uses artificial neural networks McBratney et al. introduced the concept of a soil inference system, SINFERS, where pedotransfer functions are the knowledge rules for soil inference engines.

A soil inference system takes measurements with a given level of certainty and by means of logically linked pedotransfer functions infers data, not known with minimal inaccuracy. Moisture equivalent Nonlimiting water range Soil functions