Laocoön, the son of Acoetes, is a figure in Greek and Roman mythology and the Epic Cycle. He was a Trojan priest, attacked, with his two sons, by giant serpents sent by the gods; the story of Laocoön has been the subject of numerous artists, both in ancient and in more contemporary times. The most detailed description of Laocoön's grisly fate was provided by Quintus Smyrnaeus in Posthomerica, a literary version of events following the Iliad. According to Quintus, Laocoön begged the Trojans to set fire to the horse to ensure it was not a trick. Athena, angry with him and the Trojans, shook the ground around Laocoön's feet and painfully blinded him; the Trojans, watching this unfold, assumed Laocoön was punished for the Trojans' mutilating and doubting Sinon, the undercover Greek soldier sent to convince the Trojans to let him and the horse inside their city walls. Thus, the Trojans wheeled the great wooden Horse in. Laocoön did not give up trying to convince the Trojans to burn the horse, Athena made him pay further.

She sent two giant sea serpents to kill him and his two sons. In another version of the story, it was said that Poseidon sent the sea serpents to strangle and kill Laocoön and his two sons. According to Apollodorus, it was Apollo. Laocoön had insulted Apollo by sleeping with his wife in front of the "divine image". Virgil used the story in the Aeneid. According to Virgil, Laocoön advised the Trojans to not receive the horse from the Greeks, they were taken in by the deceitful testimony of Sinon. The enraged Laocoön threw his spear at the Horse in response. Minerva sent sea-serpents to strangle Laocoön and his two sons and Thymbraeus, for his actions. "Laocoön, ostensibly sacrificing a bull to Neptune on behalf of the city, becomes himself the tragic victim, as the simile makes clear. In some sense, his death must be symbolic of the city as a whole," S. V. Tracy notes. According to the Hellenistic poet Euphorion of Chalcis, Laocoön is in fact punished for procreating upon holy ground sacred to Poseidon.

The episode furnished the subject of Laocoön. In Aeneid, Virgil describes the circumstances of Laocoön's death: The story of Laocoön is not mentioned by Homer, but it had been the subject of a tragedy, now lost, by Sophocles and was mentioned by other Greek writers, though the events around the attack by the serpents vary considerably; the most famous account of these is now in Virgil's Aeneid where Laocoön was a priest of Neptune, killed with both his sons after attempting to expose the ruse of the Trojan Horse by striking it with a spear. Virgil gives Laocoön the famous line "Equō nē crēdite, Teucrī / Quidquid id est, timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs", or "Do not trust the Horse, Trojans / Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks bearing gifts." This line is the source of the saying: "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts." In Sophocles, however, he was a priest of Apollo who had married. The serpents killed only the two sons. In other versions he was killed for having committed an impiety by making love with his wife in the presence of a cult image in a sanctuary, or making a sacrifice in the temple with his wife present.

In this second group of versions, the snakes were sent by Poseidon and in the first by Poseidon and Athena, or Apollo, the deaths were interpreted by the Trojans as proof that the horse was a sacred object. The two versions have rather different morals: Laocoön was either punished for doing wrong, or for being right; the death of Laocoön was famously depicted in a much-admired marble Laocoön and His Sons, attributed by Pliny the Elder to the Rhodian sculptors Agesander and Polydorus, which stands in the Vatican Museums, Rome. Copies have been executed by various artists, notably Baccio Bandinelli; these show the complete sculpture and can be seen in Rhodes, at the Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and in front of the Archaeological Museum, Ukraine, amongst others. Alexander Calder designed a stabile which he called Laocoön in 1947; the marble Laocoön provided the central image for Lessing's Laocoön, 1766, an aesthetic polemic directed against Winckelmann and the comte de Caylus.

Daniel Albright reengages the role of the figure of Laocoön in aesthetic thought in his book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Literature and Other Arts. In addition to other literary references, John Barth employs a bust of Laocoön in his novella, The End of the Road; the R. E. M. Song "Laughing" references Laocoön, rendering him female; the marble's pose is parodied in the Laurel Wreath. American author Joyce Carol Oates references Laocoön in her 1989 novel American Appetites. In Stave V of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, Scrooge awakes on Christmas morning, "making a perfect Laocoon of himself with his stockings". Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly begins with an extensive analysis of the Laocoön story; the American feminist poet and author Marge Piercy includes a poem titled, "Laocoön is the name of the figure", in her collection Stone, Knife, relating love lost and beginning. John Steinbeck references Laocoön in his American literary classic East of Eden, referring to a picture of “Laocoön co

The New South Wales Institute for Educational Research is an incorporated educational research institute based in New South Wales, Australia. The NSW Institute for Educational Research Incorporated was founded in Sydney in 1928, as such is one of the oldest established research institutes in Australia. Since foundation, the Institute has continued to make a significant contribution to discourse on educational policy in New South Wales and Australia; the Constitution stipulates that the objectives of the Institute are to encourage "study and service" in education and to do this lists discussion, identification of research issues, dissemination of results. The Institute may conduct research as an Institute activity; the central activity for the NSW Institute for Educational Research is an Annual Conference, at which members present scholarly papers in research in education. The NSW Institute hosts an annual Sir Harold Wyndham Memorial Lecture, to honour an important NSW educationist; the Institute offers student grants for educational research.

The New South Wales Institute for Educational Research Award for Outstanding Educational Research was inaugurated in 1972 and is conferred for an outstanding doctoral thesis completed within the field of educational research. The Institute publishes a Newsletter and an academic journal Issues in Educational Research, jointly published with the Institutes for Educational Research in Western Australia, South Australia, the Northern Territory. Addresses to the Institute are at times published in monograph form and at times the Institute publishes its own research in monograph form; the governance of the Institute is through a constitution, administered by an elected Executive Committee. The Executive Committee reports to an Annual General Meeting. Membership is open to any persons committed to the objectives of the Institute. However, in considering applications for membership, the Institute may consider whether the applicant holds an appropriate tertiary qualification or the equivalent, the educational experience of the applicant, the research experience of the applicant.

As a state institute for educational research, the NSW Institute for Educational Research is affiliated with the Australian Council for Educational Research, elects a representative to the national body. Official website for NSW Institute for Educational Research. Official website for Journal

The Montreux/Vevey trolleybus system known as the Vevey–Villeneuve trolleybus line, forms part of the public transport network in Montreux and Vevey, in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. It comprises a single 12.75 km long trolleybus route along the length of the Riviera vaudoise on the north shore of Lake Geneva. Opened in 1957, the line is designated as line 201 of the local bus network, operated by Transports publics Vevey-Montreux-Chillon-Villeneuve. In addition to line 201, the VMCV runs eight motorbus lines. However, with 5,204,000 passengers annually, the trolleybus route is by far the busiest of all the operator's lines, generates 74 percent of its total revenue; the Vevey–Villeneuve trolleybus line is the last remaining of several interurban trolleybus lines that have existed in Switzerland. It follows Swiss main road no. 9, passes through the municipalities of Vevey, La Tour-de-Peilz, Montreux and Villeneuve, serves a total of 41 stops. The trolleybus line's ultimate predecessor, the Vevey–Montreux–Chillon tramway, opened in 1888, was Switzerland's first electric tramway.

The line was extended to Villeneuve in 1903, became the Vevey–Montreux–Chillon–Villeneuve tramway in 1913. Plans to replace the tramway with a trolleybus line were first developed in 1938, but in view of the outbreak of World War II, the design work was discontinued, it was only in 1955. The route went into operation in four sections as follows: Initially, the trolleybus service ran at a headway of 7.5 minutes, which compared favourably with the eight-minute headway of the trams. From 1963, nine bus trailers were available to augment the trolleybuses during rush hour. In the second half of the 1990s, the original overhead wires and the depot were renewed; the travel time for the Vevey Funiculaire–Villeneuve Gare trip is 38 minutes, the trip in the opposite direction takes 37 minutes. Nine trolleybus duties are required for the 10-minute clock-face schedule offered all day, allowing for a seven-minute turnaround in Vevey, eight minutes in Villeneuve. During the Montreux Jazz Festival, which takes place in July, 12 vehicles operate a special, more frequent service.

In the evenings, from 8:00 pm, the headway becomes 20 minutes. Prior to 12 December 2010, the VMCV offered an express bus service between Funiculaire Vevey and Montreux Marché every 20 minutes during peak times on the former line 1; this service stopped at only a few selected intermediate stops. The three extra duties were operated with rigid motorbuses, because only motorbuses could overtake the trolleybuses operating the regular services on that line. In the course of the integration of the VMCV into the Mobilis Vaud on 12 December 2010, the express bus service was withdrawn, not least because the trains on the Lausanne–Brig railway line running parallel to the trolleybus line could be used with the same ticket from that date. In the medium term, a 2.5 km-long extension to Rennaz is planned at the eastern end of the trolleybus line. A large hospital with 300 beds and 1,000 employees is to be built in Rennaz between 2013 and 2015, a corresponding passenger potential for the trolleybus is anticipated.

1,000 extra passengers per day are expected to be generated by the new hospital. The system's original fleet consisted of 18 rigid trolleybuses, with fleet numbers 1 to 18, they were jointly developed by Berna and the Ateliers de Constructions Mécaniques de Vevey, with electrical equipment by Société Anonyme des Ateliers de Sécheron. For the nine trolleybus duties used to operate line 201, the VMCV has 16 low-floor articulated trolleybuses with fleet numbers 1, 3-14 and 16-18, they were produced with electrical equipment by Kiepe. They entered service in place of the original fleet between 1994 and 1996 and are expected to be used until about 2020. Upon the retirement of the original fleet, the Vevey–Villeneuve line became the first Swiss trolleybus system to be operated by a low-floor fleet; the Van Hool trolleybuses were specially designed for the VMCV. Similar vehicles with the type designation AG300T were supplied to the trolleybus systems in Esslingen am Neckar, Salzburg and Arnhem. Seven trolleybuses in the current VMCV fleet serve as reserve vehicles.

Two other units from this series were sold to the Salzburg trolleybus system in 2008, due to a lack of passenger demand. They were placed in service in Salzburg after refurbishment and the allocation of new fleet numbers 259 and 260; the VMCV lent three vehicles from the reserve fleet to the neighbouring Lausanne trolleybus system between 2005 and 2007. FUTURE FLEET 16 Vanhool-Kiepe Trolleybuses are on order to replace the existing fleet; these will have the capability to operate on battery power as well as overhead: The extension to Rennaz will not have overhead wires List of trolleybus systems in Switzerland Vevey–Montreux–Chillon–Villeneuve tramway Coppex, Jean-Philippe. Les trolleybus régionaux en Suisse / Die Schweizer Überlandtrolleybusse. Genève: Verlag Endstation Ostring. ISBN 978-3-9522545-3-0. Schwandl, Robert. Schwandl's Tram Atlas Österreich. Berlin: Robert Schwandl Verlag. ISBN 978 3 936573 27 5. "Trolleybus city: Montreux-Vevey". Trolleymotion. Montreux database / photo gallery and Montreux trolleybus list at Urban Electric Transit – in various languages, including English