Martha E. Pollack
Martha Elizabeth Pollack is an American computer scientist, the 14th president of Cornell University, serving since April 2017. She was the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan, her research specialty is artificial intelligence, where her contributions include works in planning, natural language processing, activity recognition for cognitive assistance. Pollack completed her undergraduate studies in linguistics at Dartmouth College, graduating in 1979, she earned master's and doctoral degrees in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania, completing her Ph. D. in 1986 under the joint supervision of Bonnie Weber and Barbara J. Grosz. Before joining the University of Michigan faculty in 2000, she worked at SRI International from 1985 to 1992, was on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh from 1991 to 2000, she became dean of the School of Information at Michigan in 2007, Vice Provost in 2010, Provost in 2013. She has been program chair of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence in 1997, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research from 2001 to 2005, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence from 2009 to 2010.
Pollack was the winner of Thought Award. She has been a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence since 1996, of the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2012. On November 14, 2016, the Cornell University Board of Trustees announced that they had unanimously elected her as Cornell University’s 14th president, with her presidency beginning on April 17, 2017. Pollack was inaugurated on August 25, 2017
Cognate
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. Cognates are inherited from a shared parent language, but they may involve borrowings from some other language. For example, the English words dish and desk and the German word Tisch are cognates because they all come from Latin discus, which relates to their flat surfaces. Cognates may have evolved similar, different or opposite meanings, but in most cases there are some similar sounds or letters in the words; some words don't come from the same root. The word cognate derives from the Latin noun cognatus, which means "blood relative". Cognates do not need to have the same meaning, which may have changed as the languages developed separately. For example English starve and Dutch sterven or German sterben all derive from the same Proto-Germanic root, *sterbaną. Discus is from Greek δίσκος. A and separate English reflex of discus through medieval Latin desca, is desk. Cognates do not need to have similar forms: English father, French père, Armenian հայր all descend directly from Proto-Indo-European *ph₂tḗr.
Examples of cognates in Indo-European languages are the words night, noche, nacht, nicht, nat, nátt, nótt, noc, ночь, noch, ноќ, noć, нощ, nosht, ніч, nich, ноч, noch/noč, noč, noć, νύξ, nox/nocte, nakt-, natë, nueche, notte, nit, nuèch/nuèit, nakts and Naach, all meaning "night" and being derived from the Proto-Indo-European *nókʷts "night". Another Indo-European example is star, str-, tora, astre/étoile, ἀστήρ, astro/stella, aster stea, astgh, ster, Schtähn, stjerne, stjärna, stjørna, setāre, seren, estel, estela estrella and astro Spanish, estrella Asturian and Leonese and astro and estêre or stêrk, from the Proto-Indo-European *h₂stḗr "star"; the Arabic سلام salām, the Hebrew שלום shalom, the Assyrian Neo-Aramaic shlama and the Amharic selam are cognates, derived from the Proto-Semitic *šalām- "peace". Cognates may be less recognised than the above examples, authorities sometimes differ in their interpretations of the evidence; the English word milk is a cognate of German Milch, Dutch melk, Russian молоко and Bosnian, Croatian, Slovenian mleko Montenegrin mlijeko.
On the other hand, French lait, Catalan llet, Italian latte, Romanian lapte, Spanish leche and leite are less-obvious cognates of Ancient Greek γάλακτος gálaktos, a relationship, more evidently seen through the intermediate Latin lac "milk" as well as the English word lactic and other terms borrowed from Latin. All of them come from Proto-Indo-European h₂melǵ- "milk"; some cognates are semantic opposites. For instance, while the Hebrew word חוצפה chutzpah means "impudence," its Classical Arabic cognate حصافة ḥaṣāfah means "sound judgment." Cognates within a single language, or doublets, may have meanings that are or totally different. For example, English ward and guard are cognates, as are skirt. In some cases, including this one, one cognate has an ultimate source in another language related to English, but the other one is native; that happened with many loanwords, such as skirt in this example, borrowed from Old Norse during the Danelaw. Sometimes both doublets come from other languages the same one but at different times.
For example, the word chief comes from the Middle French chef, its modern pronunciation preserves the Middle French consonant sound. Such word sets can be called etymological twins, they may come in groups of higher numbers, as with, for example, the words wain, waggon/wagon, vehicle in English. A word may enter another language, develop a new form or meaning there, be re-borrowed into the original language. For example, the Greek word κίνημα became French cinéma and later returned to Greece as σινεμά. In Greek, κίνημα and σινεμά are now doublets. A less obvious English-language doublet pair is glamour. False cognates are words that people believe are related, but that linguistic examination reveals are unrelated. For example, on the basis of superficial similarities, the Latin verb habēre and German haben, both meaning'to have
Māori people
The Māori are the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand. Māori originated with settlers from eastern Polynesia, who arrived in New Zealand in several waves of canoe voyages some time between 1250 and 1300. Over several centuries in isolation, the Polynesian settlers developed a unique culture, with their own language, a rich mythology, distinctive crafts and performing arts. Early Māori formed tribal groups based on organisation. Horticulture flourished using plants; the arrival of Europeans to New Zealand, starting in the 17th century, brought enormous changes to the Māori way of life. Māori people adopted many aspects of Western society and culture. Initial relations between Māori and Europeans were amicable, with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, the two cultures coexisted as part of a new British colony. Rising tensions over disputed land sales led to conflict in the 1860s. Social upheaval, decades of conflict and epidemics of introduced disease took a devastating toll on the Māori population, which fell dramatically.
By the start of the 20th century, the Māori population had begun to recover, efforts have been made to increase their standing in wider New Zealand society and achieve social justice. Traditional Māori culture has thereby enjoyed a significant revival, further bolstered by a Māori protest movement that emerged in the 1960s. In the 2013 census, there were 600,000 people in New Zealand identifying as Māori, making up 15 percent of the national population, they are the second-largest ethnic group in New Zealand, after European New Zealanders. In addition, more than 140,000 Māori live in Australia; the Māori language is spoken to some extent by about a fifth of all Māori, representing 3 per cent of the total population. Māori are active in all spheres of New Zealand culture and society, with independent representation in areas such as media and sport. Disproportionate numbers of Māori face significant economic and social obstacles, have lower life expectancies and incomes compared with other New Zealand ethnic groups.
They suffer higher levels of crime, health problems, educational under-achievement. A number of socioeconomic initiatives have been instigated with the aim of "closing the gap" between Māori and other New Zealanders. Political and economic redress for historical grievances is ongoing. In the Māori language, the word māori means "normal", "natural" or "ordinary". In legends and oral traditions, the word distinguished ordinary mortal human beings—tāngata māori—from deities and spirits. Wai māori denotes "fresh water", as opposed to salt water. There are cognate words in most Polynesian languages, all deriving from Proto-Polynesian *maqoli, which has the reconstructed meaning "true, genuine"; the spelling of "Māori" with or without the macron is inconsistent in general-interest English-language media in New Zealand, although some newspapers and websites have adopted the standard Māori-language spelling. Early visitors from Europe to New Zealand referred to the indigenous inhabitants as "New Zealanders" or as "natives".
The Māori used the term Māori to describe themselves in a pan-tribal sense. Māori people use the term tangata whenua to identify in a way that expresses their relationship with a particular area of land; the term can refer to the Māori people as a whole in relation to New Zealand as a whole. The Māori Purposes Act of 1947 required the use of the term "Māori" rather than "Native" in official usage; the Department of Native Affairs was renamed as the Department of Māori Affairs. Before 1974, the government required documented ancestry to determine the legal definition of "a Māori person". For example, bloodlines or percentage of Māori ancestry was used to determine whether a person should enroll on the general electoral roll or the separate Māori roll. In 1947, the authorities determined that a man, five-eighths Māori had improperly voted in the general parliamentary electorate of Raglan; the Māori Affairs Amendment Act 1974 changed the definition, allowing individuals to self-identify as to their cultural identity.
In matters involving financial benefits provided by the government to people of Māori ethnicity—scholarships, for example, or Waitangi Tribunal settlements—authorities require some documentation of ancestry or continuing cultural connection but no minimum "blood" requirement exists as determined by the government. The most current reliable evidence indicates that the initial settlement of New Zealand occurred around 1280 CE, at the end of the medieval warm period. Previous dating of some kiore bones at 50–150 has now been shown to have been unreliable. Māori oral history describes the arrival of ancestors from Hawaiki, in large ocean-going waka. Migration accounts vary among tribes, whose members may identify with several waka in their genealogies. In the last few decades, mitochondrial-DNA research has allowed an estimate to be made of the number of women in the founding population—between 50 and 100. Evidence fro
Ihaia Te Kirikumara
Ihāia Te Kirikūmara was a notable New Zealand tribal leader. Of Māori descent, he identified with the Te Ati Awa iwi, he was born in Taranaki, New Zealand
Treaty of Waitangi
The Treaty of Waitangi is a treaty first signed on 6 February 1840 by representatives of the British Crown and Māori chiefs from the North Island of New Zealand. It is a document of central importance to the history and political constitution of the state of New Zealand, has been significant in framing the political relations between New Zealand's government and the Māori population; the Treaty was written at a time when British colonists were pressuring the Crown to establish a colony in New Zealand, when some Māori leaders had petitioned the British for protection against French forces. It was drafted with the intention of establishing a British Governor of New Zealand, recognising Māori ownership of their lands and other possessions, giving Māori the rights of British subjects, it was intended to ensure that when the declaration of British sovereignty over New Zealand was made by Lieutenant Governor William Hobson in May 1840, the Māori people would not feel that their rights had been ignored.
Once it had been written and translated, it was first signed by Northern Māori leaders at Waitangi, subsequently copies of the Treaty were taken around New Zealand and over the following months many other chiefs signed. Around 530 to 540 Māori, at least 13 of them women, signed the Treaty of Waitangi, despite some Māori leaders cautioning against it. An immediate result of the Treaty was that Queen Victoria's government gained the sole right to purchase land. In total there are nine signed copies of the Treaty of Waitangi including the sheet signed on 6 February 1840 at Waitangi; the text of the Treaty includes three articles. It is bilingual, with the Māori text translated from the English. Article one of the English text cedes "all powers of sovereignty" to the Crown. Article two establishes the continued ownership of the Māori over their lands, establishes the exclusive right of pre-emption of the Crown. Article three gives Māori people full protections as British subjects. However, the English text and the Māori text differ in meaning particularly in relation to the meaning of having and ceding sovereignty.
These discrepancies led to disagreements in the decades following the signing culminating in the New Zealand Wars. During the second half of the 19th century, Māori lost control of the land they had owned, some through legitimate sale, but due to unfair land deals or outright seizure in the aftermath of the New Zealand War. In the period following the New Zealand Wars, the New Zealand government ignored the Treaty and a court case judgement in 1877 declared it to be "a simple nullity". Beginning in the 1950s, Māori sought to use the Treaty as a platform for claiming additional rights to sovereignty and to reclaim lost land, governments in the 1960s and 1970s were responsive to these arguments, giving the Treaty an central role in the interpretation of land rights and relations between Māori people and the state. In 1975, the Treaty of Waitangi Act was passed establishing the Waitangi Tribunal as a permanent commission of inquiry tasked with interpreting the Treaty, researching breaches of the Treaty by the British Crown or its agents, to suggest means of redress.
In most cases, recommendations of the Tribunal are not binding on the Crown, but settlements totalling $1 billion have been awarded to various Māori groups. Various legislation passed in the part of the 20th century has made reference to the Treaty, but the Treaty has never been made part of New Zealand municipal law. Nonetheless, the Treaty is regarded as the founding document of New Zealand. Waitangi Day was established as a national holiday in 1974 and commemorates the date of the signing of the Treaty; the first contact between the Māori and Europeans was in 1642, when Dutch explorer Abel Tasman arrived and was fought off, again in 1769 when the English navigator Captain James Cook claimed New Zealand for Britain at the Mercury Islands. The British government showed little interest in following up this claim for over half a century; the first mention of New Zealand in British statutes is in the Murders Abroad Act of 1817, which clarified that New Zealand was not a British colony and "not within His Majesty's dominions".
Between 1795 and 1830 a steady flow of sealing and whaling ships visited New Zealand stopping at the Bay of Islands for food supplies and recreation. Many of the ships came from Sydney. Trade between Sydney and New Zealand increased as traders sought kauri timber and flax and missionaries purchased large areas of land in the Bay of Islands; this trade was seen as mutually advantageous, Māori tribes competed for access to the services of Europeans that had chosen to live on the islands because they brought goods and knowledge that were essential to the local iwi. At the same time, Europeans living in New Zealand needed the protection that Māori chiefs could provide; as a result of trade, Māori society changed drastically up to the 1840s. They changed their society from one of subsistence farming and gathering to cultivating useful trade crops; the Māori respected the British due to encouragement from missionaries and due to British status as a major maritime power, made apparent to Māori travelling outside New Zealand.
The other major powers in the area around the 1830s included American whalers, whom the Māori accepted as cousins of the British, French Catholics who came for trade and as missionaries. The Māori were still distrustful of the French, due to a massacre of 250 people that had occurred in 1772
Elsdon Best
Elsdon Best was an ethnographer who made important contributions to the study of the Māori of New Zealand. Elsdon Best was born 30 June 1856 at Tawa Flat, New Zealand, to William Best and the former Hannah Haynes Nibbs; when his father obtained a position at the Colonial Treasury, the family moved from its farmstead at Grasslees Farm to Wellington, where Best, now aged 9, went to school. After completing his formal education, he took and passed the Civil Service examination and became a clerk in 1873. Within a year he found the work uncongenial and moved to Poverty Bay, where he worked in farming and forestry. In 1881 Best joined the Armed Constabulary. Based in the Taranaki at a time of increased tensions between the Māori and the colonial settlers in the area, he became involved in the arrests of protesters. Through the influence of his brother-in-law, Walter Gudgeon, he transferred to a Māori contingent and that year he participated in the raid on Parihaka, he left the Armed Constabulary after two years of service to travel to the United States of America, where he worked for three years, first in Hawaii and in California, mustering cattle and doing forestry.
Best returned to New Zealand in 1886 and entered into a timber venture with his brother, using sawmilling equipment he had purchased in the United States. He came into increasing contact with the Māori and, encouraged by Gudgeon and other notable settlers from the Taranaki, including Percy Smith, studied their language and culture, his timber business Best moved to Wellington, where he found work as a storeman. When Smith established the Polynesian Society in 1892 with the intention of promoting interest in and discussion of Polynesian history and culture, Best became a foundation member. For the Society's first edition of its Journal he wrote an article on the people of the Philippines, he began a series of publications concerning the history of Wellington Harbour. In 1895, when the Urewera district began to be opened up for European settlement, Best took a position as quarter-master with the road works, beginning in Te Whaiti. For the next 15 years, he worked in the district, using his presence in the area to build up a relationship with many Tūhoe elders and record the facts of the culture and traditions of the Tūhoe, which were still intact.
He recorded his observations in field records and note books that he kept now for the rest of his life. His relationship with Tutakangahau is the subject of a recent book. Best's devotion to his study, together with his facility in Māori, allowed him to win the confidence of the Tūhoe, whose traditions he published in a series of articles in the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute and the Journal of the Polynesian Society. In 1897, he published the monograph Waikaremoana, the Sea of Rippling Waters, With a Tramp through Tuhoe Land, in which he presented the lore of the district. In 1910, Best was appointed ethnologist at the Dominion Museum which allowed him to pursue his research in a more focused manner. In 1912, he published The Stone Implements of the Maori, followed four years by an accompanying bulletin on Māori storehouses. In 1919, his The Land of Tara appeared, a history of the Māori of Wellington Harbour. A systematic survey of traditional Māori culture, The Maori, appeared in two volumes in 1924, in 1925 Best's Tuhoe, the Children of the Mist.
This a monumental study in 1200 pages of the traditional history and culture of tribe with which he had spent so much of his life. In 1914, Best was awarded the Hector Medal of the New Zealand Institute, in 1919 he was made a fellow. Best died in 1931 in Wellington, survived by his widow Adelaide, they had no children. His ashes lay buried beneath a monument, erected in 1960, in his birth town of Tawa at Grasslees Reserve; the nearby suburb of Elsdon, Porirua was named in his memory. Encyclopedia of New Zealand, vol. 1, pp. 199–200. Journal of the Polynesian Society 41 Man of the Mist – a Biography of Elsdon Best by E. W. G. Craig Best of Both Worlds by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman Elsdon Best, l’ethnographe immémorial by Frederico Delgado Rosa Works by Elsdon Best Dictionary of NZ Biography entry Obituary by Te Rangi Hiroa in Transactions of the Royal Society of New Zealand Biography in 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand The Land of Tara in Wellington Public Library website Best of Tawa new book 1921 paper on Old Redoubts and Fortifications in Wellington
Queen Victoria
Victoria was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. On 1 May 1876, she adopted the additional title of Empress of India. Victoria was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, the fourth son of King George III. Both the Duke and the King died in 1820, Victoria was raised under close supervision by her mother, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, she inherited the throne at the age of 18, after her father's three elder brothers had all died, leaving no surviving legitimate children. The United Kingdom was an established constitutional monarchy, in which the sovereign held little direct political power. Victoria attempted to influence government policy and ministerial appointments. Victoria married her first cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840, their nine children married into royal and noble families across the continent, tying them together and earning her the sobriquet "the grandmother of Europe". After Albert's death in 1861, Victoria avoided public appearances.
As a result of her seclusion, republicanism temporarily gained strength, but in the latter half of her reign, her popularity recovered. Her Golden and Diamond Jubilees were times of public celebration, her reign of 63 years and seven months was longer than that of any of her predecessors and is known as the Victorian era. It was a period of industrial, political and military change within the United Kingdom, was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire, she was the last British monarch of the House of Hanover. Her son and successor, Edward VII, initiated the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the line of his father. Victoria's father was Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, the fourth son of the reigning King of the United Kingdom, George III; until 1817, Edward's niece, Princess Charlotte of Wales, was the only legitimate grandchild of George III. Her death in 1817 precipitated a succession crisis that brought pressure on the Duke of Kent and his unmarried brothers to marry and have children.
In 1818 he married Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, a widowed German princess with two children—Carl and Feodora —by her first marriage to the Prince of Leiningen. Her brother Leopold was Princess Charlotte's widower; the Duke and Duchess of Kent's only child, was born at 4.15 a.m. on 24 May 1819 at Kensington Palace in London. Victoria was christened by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Manners-Sutton, on 24 June 1819 in the Cupola Room at Kensington Palace, she was baptised Alexandrina after one of her godparents, Emperor Alexander I of Russia, Victoria, after her mother. Additional names proposed by her parents—Georgina and Augusta—were dropped on the instructions of Kent's eldest brother, the Prince Regent. At birth, Victoria was fifth in the line of succession after the four eldest sons of George III: George, the Prince Regent; the Prince Regent had no surviving children, the Duke of York had no children. The Duke of Clarence and the Duke of Kent married on the same day in 1818, but both of Clarence's legitimate daughters died as infants.
The first of these was Princess Charlotte, born and died on 27 March 1819, two months before Victoria was born. Victoria's father died in January 1820. A week her grandfather died and was succeeded by his eldest son as George IV. Victoria was third in line to the throne after York and Clarence. Clarence's second daughter was Princess Elizabeth of Clarence who lived for twelve weeks from 10 December 1820 to 4 March 1821 and, while Elizabeth lived, Victoria was fourth in line; the Duke of York died in 1827. When George IV died in 1830, he was succeeded by his next surviving brother, Clarence, as William IV, Victoria became heir presumptive; the Regency Act 1830 made special provision for Victoria's mother to act as regent in case William died while Victoria was still a minor. King William distrusted the Duchess's capacity to be regent, in 1836 he declared in her presence that he wanted to live until Victoria's 18th birthday, so that a regency could be avoided. Victoria described her childhood as "rather melancholy".
Her mother was protective, Victoria was raised isolated from other children under the so-called "Kensington System", an elaborate set of rules and protocols devised by the Duchess and her ambitious and domineering comptroller, Sir John Conroy, rumoured to be the Duchess's lover. The system prevented the princess from meeting people whom her mother and Conroy deemed undesirable, was designed to render her weak and dependent upon them; the Duchess avoided the court because she was scandalised by the presence of King William's illegitimate children. Victoria shared a bedroom with her mother every night, studied with private tutors to a regular timetable, spent her play-hours with her dolls and her King Charles Spaniel, Dash, her lessons included French, German and Latin, but she spoke only English at home. In 1830, the Duchess of Kent and Conroy took Victoria across the centre of England to visit the Malvern Hills, stopping at towns and great country houses along the way. Similar journeys to oth
