A postal code is a series of letters or digits or both, sometimes including spaces or punctuation, included in a postal address for the purpose of sorting mail. In February 2005, 117 of the 190 member countries of the Universal Postal Union had postal code systems. Although postal codes are assigned to geographical areas, special codes are sometimes assigned to individual addresses or to institutions that receive large volumes of mail, such as government agencies and large commercial companies. One example is the French CEDEX system. There are a number of synonyms for postal code. CAP: The standard term in Italy. CEP: The standard term in Brazil. Eircode: The standard term in Ireland. NPA in French-speaking Switzerland and Italian-speaking Switzerland. PIN: The standard term in India. Sometimes redundantly called a PIN code. PLZ: The standard term in Germany, German-speaking Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Postal code: The general term is used in Canada. Postcode: This solid compound is popular in many English-speaking countries and is the standard term in the Netherlands.

PSČ: The standard term in Slovakia and Czech Republic. ZIP code: The standard term in the United States and the Philippines; the development of postal codes reflects the increasing complexity of postal delivery as populations grew and the built environment became more complex. This happened first in large cities. Postal codes began with postal district numbers within large cities. London was first subdivided into 10 districts in 1857, Liverpool in 1864. By World War I, such postal district or zone numbers existed in various large European cities, they existed in the United States at least as early as the 1920s implemented at the local post office level only although they were evidently not used throughout all major US cities until World War II. By 1930 or earlier the idea of extending postal district or zone numbering plans beyond large cities to cover small towns and rural locales was in the air; these developed into postal codes. The name of US postal codes, "ZIP codes", reflects this evolutionary growth from a zone plan to a zone improvement plan, "ZIP".

Modern postal codes were first introduced in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in December 1932, but the system was abandoned in 1939. The next country to introduce postal codes was Germany in 1941, followed by Singapore in 1950, Argentina in 1958, the United States in 1963 and Switzerland in 1964; the United Kingdom began introducing its current system in Norwich in 1959, but they were not used nationwide until 1974. The classic postal codes of the 1970s are not fine-grained, but modern digital maps can generate geocodes, it can be used as a finer location code with the same number of digits, without administrative cost. Classical postcodes are administrated by a central authority: this control can be used to obtain profits when data is not opened. By 2016, according to ODI, only 8% of postal codes were opened; the characters used in postal codes are The Arabic numerals "0" to "9" Letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet Spaces, hyphens Postal codes in the Netherlands did not use the letters'F','I','O','Q','U' and'Y' for technical reasons.

But as all existing combinations are now used, these letters were allowed for new locations starting 2005. The letter combinations "SS", "SD", "SA" are not used for historical reasons. Postal codes in Canada do not include the letters D, F, I, O, Q, or U, as the optical character recognition equipment used in automated sorting could confuse them with other letters and digits; the letters W and Z are used, but are not used as the first letter. The Canadian Postal Codes use alternate letters and numbers in this format: A9A 9A9In Ireland the eircode system uses the following letters only: A, C, D, E, F, H, K, N, P, R, T, V, W, X, Y; this serves two purposes: to avoid confusion in OCR, it helps to avoid accidental double-entendres by avoiding the creation of word look-alikes, as Eircode's last four characters are random. Most of the postal code systems are numeric. Alphanumeric systems can, given the same number of characters, encode many more locations. For example, while a two digit numeric code can represent 100 locations, a two character alphanumeric code using ten numbers and twenty letters can represent 900 locations.

The independent nations using alphanumeric postal code systems are: Argentina Brunei Canada Eswatini Ireland Jamaica Kazakhstan Malta Netherlands Peru The postal code format in Peru was updated in February 2011 to be of the format of five digits. Somalia United Kingdom Coun

"Running" is a song by Hungarian American singer András Kállay-Saunders. It was chosen to represent Hungary at the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 in Denmark. In an interview with Wiwibloggs, András stated that "Running" was inspired by one of his friends, an abuse victim, he said that he wanted to bring awareness to this topic through his voice and he would like for abuse victims to know that they don't have to be afraid to speak up and ask for help. The song's reviews were positive. With 10 reviews from Wiwibloggs, "Running" received an average of 8.65 out of 10 and was described as the year's favorite. Wiwi said "Running" has strong vocals and clever production. Angus gave the song a rate of 7.5 and described "Running" was dark and had relentless composition. Billy gave the song a rate of 10 and remarked the "touching lyrics", he said "Running" was his favorite of the year. Bogdan gave the song 9 out of 10 and said "András has brought a serious matter to the Eurovision table". Deban gave the song 9.5 out of 10 and said that András deserved a composer award for capturing social concerns with music.

Katie praised András's vocal performance. Padraig and Patrick both gave "Running" a rate of 9.5 of 10. Sami said that "Running" was one of the strongest songs. Lastly, Vebooboo gave the lowest score for "Running", 6.5 out of 10 and said "there are a couple of times where the song builds to a climax, but it just stops and goes back to the basic refrain". Eurovision Song Contest Radio is a website that host an international voting poll each year for various awards. András won for Best Best Male Artist. Hungary in the Eurovision Song Contest 2014

Technodelic is the fifth studio album by Yellow Magic Orchestra, released in 1981. The album is notable for its experimental and heavy use of digital samplers which were not used until the mid-to-late 1980s, resulting in a more minimalist sound compared to their previous work, it is considered the first released album to feature samples and loops, influencing the heavy use of sampling and looping in popular music. Yellow Magic Orchestra's approach to sampling music was a precursor to the contemporary approach of constructing music by cutting fragments of sounds and looping them using computer technology. In 2016, the Canadian post-punk group Preoccupations covered the track "Key" as a part of a 7" vinyl that came with pre-orders of their self-titled album alongside a cover of The Raincoats' 1979 track "Off-Duty Trip". Most of the sampling was made with an LMD-649, a custom-built digital sampler developed by Toshiba-EMI engineer Kenji Murata; the LMD-649 was the first PCM digital sampler, capable of playing and recording PCM samples with a 12-bit audio depth and 50 kHz sampling rate, stored in 128 KB of dynamic RAM memory.

It had sampling drum machine capabilities. Notable samples used include Indonesian kecak chanting and short looped vocals for percussion in "Seoul Music", the final two tracks feature factory noises; the LMD-649 was used by other Japanese synthpop artists in the early 1980s, including YMO-associated acts such as Chiemi Manabe and Logic System in 1982. The album features use of speech through a two-way radio, a prepared piano, a Roland TR-808 drum machine, Prophet-5 synthesizers. In another departure from previous albums, Haruomi Hosono has a more prominent role playing the bass guitar as opposed to playing bass lines on synthesizers; as with many of YMO's releases, song titles are printed in both English. For "Seoul Music", the kanji "京城" are used, referring to Gyeongseong, the name of Seoul when Korea was under Japanese rule. "灯" refers to the light of a lantern. "Neue Tanz" is German for "New Dance", while "Taisō" is Japanese for "gymnastics" or "calisthenics". Yellow Magic Orchestra – Arrangements, Sampler, Mixing engineers, Producers Haruomi Hosono – Bass, Synth Bass, Vocals Ryuichi Sakamoto – Keyboards, Vocals Yukihiro Takahashi – Vocals, Electronic drumsGuest musicians Hideki Matsutake – Technical assistance Takeshii Fujii & Akihiko Yamazoe – Equipment Peter Barakan – Lyrics, Transceiver Voice on "Pure Jam"Staff Shōrō Kawazoe – Executive Producer Mitsuo Koike – Recording & Mixing engineer Yoshifumi Īo – Assistant Engineer Hiroshi Yuasa – Mastering engineer Kazusuke Obi – A&R Coordinator Yōichi Itō & Hiroshi Ōkura – Management Plan-New Werk – Creative Services Masayoshi Sukita – Art director, Photography Technodelic at AllMusic.

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