Intelsat
Intelsat Corporation—formerly INTEL-SAT, INTELSAT, Intelsat—is a communications satellite services provider. Formed as International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, it was—from 1964 to 2001—an intergovernmental consortium owning and managing a constellation of communications satellites providing international broadcast services; as of March 2011, Intelsat operates a fleet of 52 communications satellites, one of the world's largest fleet of commercial satellites. They claim to serve around 1,500 customers and employ a staff of 1,100 people. John F. Kennedy instigated the creation of INTELSAT with his speech to the United Nations on the 25th of September 1961. Less than a year John F. Kennedy signed the Communications Satellite Act of 1962. INTELSAT was formed as International Telecommunications Satellite Organization and operated from 1964 to 2001 as an intergovernmental consortium owning and managing a constellation of communications satellites providing international broadcast services.
In 2001, the international satellite market was commercialized, the US predominant role in INTELSAT was privatized after 2001 as Intelsat was formed up as a private Luxembourg corporation. The International Governmental Organization began on 20 August 1964, with 7 participating countries; the 1964 agreement was an interim arrangement on a path to a more permanent agreement. The permanent international organization was established in 1973, following inter-nation negotiations from 1969 to 1971; the most difficult issue to "resolve concerned the shift from management of the system by a national entity to management by the international organization itself."On 6 April 1965, INTELSAT's first satellite, the Intelsat I, was placed in geostationary orbit above the Atlantic Ocean by a Delta D rocket. In 1973, the name was changed and there were 81 signatories. INTELSAT was "governed by two international agreements: The Agreement setting forth the basic provisions and principles and structure of the organization, signed by the governments through their foreign ministries, an Operating Agreement setting forth more detailed financial and technical provisions and signed by the governments or their designated telecommunications entities."—in most cases the latter are the ministries of communications of the party countries, but in the case of the United States, was the Communications Satellite Corporation, a private corporation established by federal legislation to represent the US in international governance for the global communication satellite system.
INTELSAT at that time directly owned and managed a global communications satellite system, structurally consisted of three parts: the Assembly of Parties—meeting every two years and concerned with aspects "primarily of interest to the Parties as sovereign States."—with each country having one vote. The Meeting of Signatories—meeting annually and composed of all the signatories to the Operating Agreement—primarily working on financial and program matters, with each countries' signatory having one vote. A Board of Governors, meeting at least four times each year, making decisions on design, establishment and maintenance of the in-space assets, appointed by signatories, but weighted to each signatories "investment share" in the space assets; the 1973 Agreement called for a seven-year transition from national to international management, but continued until 1976 to carve out "technical and operational management of the system the Communications Satellite Corporation served as the Manager of the global system under the interim arrangements in force from 1964 to 1973."
Phases of the transition resulted in full international governance by 1980. Financial contribution to the organization, it's so-called "investment share," was proportional to each member's use of the system, determined annually. Intelsat provides service to over 600 Earth stations in more than 149 countries and dependencies. By 2001, INTELSAT had over 100 members, it was this year that INTELSAT privatized and changed its name to Intelsat. Since its inception, Intelsat has used several versions of its dedicated Intelsat satellites. Intelsat completes each block of spacecraft independently, leading to a variety of contractors over the years. Intelsat’s largest spacecraft supplier is Space Systems/Loral, having built 31 spacecraft, or nearly half of the fleet; the network in its early years was not as robust. A failure of the Atlantic satellite in the spring of 1969 threatened to stop the Apollo 11 mission. During the Apollo 11 moonwalk, the moon was over the Pacific Ocean, so other antennas were used, as well as INTELSAT III, in geostationary orbit over the Pacific.
By the 1990s, building and launching satellites was no longer a government domain and as country-specific telecommunications systems were privatized, several private satellite operators arose to meet the growing demand. In the U. S. satellite operators such as PanAmSat, Orion Communications, Columbia Communications, Globalstar, TRW and others formed under the umbrella of the Alliance for Competitive International Satellite Services to press for an end to the IGOs and the monopoly position of COMSAT the US signatory to Intelsat and Inmarsat. In March 2001, the US Congress passed the Open Market Reorganisation for the B
Radio
Radio is the technology of signalling or communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 300 gigahertz, they are generated by an electronic device called a transmitter connected to an antenna which radiates the waves, received by a radio receiver connected to another antenna. Radio is widely used in modern technology, in radio communication, radio navigation, remote control, remote sensing and other applications. In radio communication, used in radio and television broadcasting, cell phones, two-way radios, wireless networking and satellite communication among numerous other uses, radio waves are used to carry information across space from a transmitter to a receiver, by modulating the radio signal in the transmitter. In radar, used to locate and track objects like aircraft, ships and missiles, a beam of radio waves emitted by a radar transmitter reflects off the target object, the reflected waves reveal the object's location. In radio navigation systems such as GPS and VOR, a mobile receiver receives radio signals from navigational radio beacons whose position is known, by measuring the arrival time of the radio waves the receiver can calculate its position on Earth.
In wireless remote control devices like drones, garage door openers, keyless entry systems, radio signals transmitted from a controller device control the actions of a remote device. Applications of radio waves which do not involve transmitting the waves significant distances, such as RF heating used in industrial processes and microwave ovens, medical uses such as diathermy and MRI machines, are not called radio; the noun radio is used to mean a broadcast radio receiver. Radio waves were first identified and studied by German physicist Heinrich Hertz in 1886; the first practical radio transmitters and receivers were developed around 1895-6 by Italian Guglielmo Marconi, radio began to be used commercially around 1900. To prevent interference between users, the emission of radio waves is regulated by law, coordinated by an international body called the International Telecommunications Union, which allocates frequency bands in the radio spectrum for different uses. Radio waves are radiated by electric charges undergoing acceleration.
They are generated artificially by time varying electric currents, consisting of electrons flowing back and forth in a metal conductor called an antenna. In transmission, a transmitter generates an alternating current of radio frequency, applied to an antenna; the antenna radiates the power in the current as radio waves. When the waves strike the antenna of a radio receiver, they push the electrons in the metal back and forth, inducing a tiny alternating current; the radio receiver connected to the receiving antenna detects this oscillating current and amplifies it. As they travel further from the transmitting antenna, radio waves spread out so their signal strength decreases, so radio transmissions can only be received within a limited range of the transmitter, the distance depending on the transmitter power, antenna radiation pattern, receiver sensitivity, noise level, presence of obstructions between transmitter and receiver. An omnidirectional antenna transmits or receives radio waves in all directions, while a directional antenna or high gain antenna transmits radio waves in a beam in a particular direction, or receives waves from only one direction.
Radio waves travel through a vacuum at the speed of light, in air at close to the speed of light, so the wavelength of a radio wave, the distance in meters between adjacent crests of the wave, is inversely proportional to its frequency. In radio communication systems, information is carried across space using radio waves. At the sending end, the information to be sent is converted by some type of transducer to a time-varying electrical signal called the modulation signal; the modulation signal may be an audio signal representing sound from a microphone, a video signal representing moving images from a video camera, or a digital signal consisting of a sequence of bits representing binary data from a computer. The modulation signal is applied to a radio transmitter. In the transmitter, an electronic oscillator generates an alternating current oscillating at a radio frequency, called the carrier wave because it serves to "carry" the information through the air; the information signal is used to modulate the carrier, varying some aspect of the carrier wave, impressing the information on the carrier.
Different radio systems use different modulation methods: AM - in an AM transmitter, the amplitude of the radio carrier wave is varied by the modulation signal. FM - in an FM transmitter, the frequency of the radio carrier wave is varied by the modulation signal. FSK - used in wireless digital devices to transmit digital signals, the frequency of the carrier wave is shifted periodically between two frequencies that represent the two binary digits, 0 and 1, to transmit a sequence of bits. OFDM - a family of complicated digital modulation methods widely used in high bandwidth systems such as WiFi networks, digital television broadcasting, digital audio broadcasting to transmit digital data using a minimum of radio spectrum bandwidth. OFDM has higher spectral efficiency and more resistance to fading than AM or FM. Multiple radio carrier waves spaced in frequency are transmitted within the radio channel, with each carrier modulated with bits from the incoming bitstream
Demographics of Vanuatu
This article is about the demographic features of the population of Vanuatu, including population density, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population. The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook. 275,974 0-14 years: 36.71% 15-24 years: 19.94% 25-54 years: 34.45% 55-64 years: 5.13% 65 years and over: 3.77% 1.95% 25.04 births/1,000 population 4.09 deaths/1,000 population -1.47 migrant/1,000 population At birth: 1.05 male/female 0-14 years: 1.04 male/female 15-24 years: 0.99 male/female 25-54 years: 0.96 male/female 55-64 years: 1.02 male/female 65 years and over: 1.04 male/female Total population: 1 male/female Total: 15.7 deaths/1,000 live births Male: 16.77 deaths/1,000 live births Female: 14.58 deaths/1,000 live births Total population: 73.06 years Male: 71.47 years Female: 74.72 years 3.25 children born/woman Ni-Vanuatu Ni-Vanuatu Ni-Vanuatu 97.6% Part Ni-Vanuatu 1.1% Other 1.3% Protestant 70% Presbyterian 27.9% Anglican 15.1% Seventh-day Adventist 12.5% Assemblies of God 4.7% Church of Christ 4.5% Neil Thomas Ministry 3.1% Apostolic 2.2%) Roman Catholic 12.4%, Customary beliefs 3.7% Including Jon Frum cargo cult Other 12.6% None 1.1% Unspecified 0.2% Local languages 63.2% Bislama 33.7% English 2% French 0.6% Other 0.5% Total population: 85.2% Male: 86.6% Female: 83.8%
Solomon Islands
Solomon Islands is a sovereign state consisting of six major islands and over 900 smaller islands in Oceania lying to the east of Papua New Guinea and northwest of Vanuatu and covering a land area of 28,400 square kilometres. The country's capital, Honiara, is located on the island of Guadalcanal; the country takes its name from the Solomon Islands archipelago, a collection of Melanesian islands that includes the North Solomon Islands, but excludes outlying islands, such as Rennell and Bellona, the Santa Cruz Islands. The islands have been inhabited for thousands of years. In 1568, the Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña was the first European to visit them, naming them the Islas Salomón. Britain defined its area of interest in the Solomon Islands archipelago in June 1893, when Captain Gibson R. N. of HMS Curacoa, declared the southern Solomon Islands a British protectorate. During World War II, the Solomon Islands campaign saw fierce fighting between the United States and the Empire of Japan, such as in the Battle of Guadalcanal.
The official name of the British administration was changed from "the British Solomon Islands Protectorate" to "the Solomon Islands" in 1975, self-government was achieved the year after. Independence was obtained in 1978 and the name changed to just "Solomon Islands", without the "the". At independence, Solomon Islands became a constitutional monarchy; the Queen of Solomon Islands is Elizabeth II, represented by Sir Frank Kabui. The prime minister is Rick Houenipwela. In 1568, the Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña was the first European to visit the Solomon Islands archipelago, naming it Islas Salomón after the wealthy biblical King Solomon, it is said that they were given this name in the mistaken assumption that they contained great riches, he believed them to be the Bible-mentioned city of Ophir. During most of the period of British rule the territory was named "the British Solomon Islands Protectorate". On 22 June 1975 the territory was renamed "the Solomon Islands"; when Solomon Islands became independent in 1978, the name was changed to "Solomon Islands".
The definite article, "the", is not part of the country's official name but is sometimes used, both within and outside the country. It is believed that Papuan-speaking settlers began to arrive around 30,000 BC. Austronesian speakers arrived c. 4000 BC bringing cultural elements such as the outrigger canoe. Between 1200 and 800 BC the ancestors of the Polynesians, the Lapita people, arrived from the Bismarck Archipelago with their characteristic ceramics; the first European to visit the islands was the Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira, coming from Peru in 1568. Some of the earliest and most regular foreign visitors to the islands were whaling vessels from Britain, the United States and Australia, they came for food and water from late in the 18th century and took aboard islanders to serve as crewmen on their ships. Relations between the islanders and visiting seamen was not always good and sometimes there was violence and bloodshed. Missionaries began visiting the Solomons in the mid-19th century.
They made little progress at first, because "blackbirding" led to a series of reprisals and massacres. The evils of the slave trade prompted the United Kingdom to declare a protectorate over the southern Solomons in June 1893. In 1898 and 1899, more outlying islands were added to the protectorate. Traditional trade and social intercourse between the western Solomon Islands of Mono and Alu and the traditional societies in the south of Bougainville, continued without hindrance. Missionaries settled in the Solomons under the protectorate, converting most of the population to Christianity. In the early 20th century several British and Australian firms began large-scale coconut planting. Economic growth was slow and the islanders benefited little. Journalist Joe Melvin visited as part of his undercover investigation into blackbirding. In 1908 the islands were visited by Jack London, cruising the Pacific on his boat, the Snark. With the outbreak of the Second World War most planters and traders were evacuated to Australia and most cultivation ceased.
Some of the most intense fighting of the war occurred in the Solomons. The most significant of the Allied Forces' operations against the Japanese Imperial Forces was launched on 7 August 1942, with simultaneous naval bombardments and amphibious landings on the Florida Islands at Tulagi and Red Beach on Guadalcanal; the Battle of Guadalcanal became an important and bloody campaign fought in the Pacific War as the Allies began to repulse the Japanese expansion. Of strategic importance during the war were the coastwatchers operating in remote locations on Japanese held islands, providing early warning and intelligence of Japanese naval and aircraft movements during the campaign. Sergeant-Major Jacob Vouza was a notable coastwatcher who, after capture, refused to divulge Allied information in spite of interrogation and torture by Japanese Imperial forces, he was awarded a Silver Star Medal by the Americans, the United States' third-highest decoration for valor in combat. Islanders Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana were the first to find the shipwrecked John F. Kennedy and his crew of the PT-109.
They suggested writing a rescue message on a coconut, delivered the coconut by paddling a dug
Television
Television, sometimes shortened to tele or telly, is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome, or in color, in two or three dimensions and sound. The term can refer to a television set, a television program, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising and news. Television became available in crude experimental forms in the late 1920s, but it would still be several years before the new technology would be marketed to consumers. After World War II, an improved form of black-and-white TV broadcasting became popular in the United States and Britain, television sets became commonplace in homes and institutions. During the 1950s, television was the primary medium for influencing public opinion. In the mid-1960s, color broadcasting was introduced in most other developed countries; the availability of multiple types of archival storage media such as Betamax, VHS tape, local disks, DVDs, flash drives, high-definition Blu-ray Discs, cloud digital video recorders has enabled viewers to watch pre-recorded material—such as movies—at home on their own time schedule.
For many reasons the convenience of remote retrieval, the storage of television and video programming now occurs on the cloud. At the end of the first decade of the 2000s, digital television transmissions increased in popularity. Another development was the move from standard-definition television to high-definition television, which provides a resolution, higher. HDTV may be transmitted in various formats: 1080p, 720p. Since 2010, with the invention of smart television, Internet television has increased the availability of television programs and movies via the Internet through streaming video services such as Netflix, Amazon Video, iPlayer and Hulu. In 2013, 79 % of the world's households owned; the replacement of early bulky, high-voltage cathode ray tube screen displays with compact, energy-efficient, flat-panel alternative technologies such as LCDs, OLED displays, plasma displays was a hardware revolution that began with computer monitors in the late 1990s. Most TV sets sold in the 2000s were flat-panel LEDs.
Major manufacturers announced the discontinuation of CRT, DLP, fluorescent-backlit LCDs by the mid-2010s. In the near future, LEDs are expected to be replaced by OLEDs. Major manufacturers have announced that they will produce smart TVs in the mid-2010s. Smart TVs with integrated Internet and Web 2.0 functions became the dominant form of television by the late 2010s. Television signals were distributed only as terrestrial television using high-powered radio-frequency transmitters to broadcast the signal to individual television receivers. Alternatively television signals are distributed by coaxial cable or optical fiber, satellite systems and, since the 2000s via the Internet; until the early 2000s, these were transmitted as analog signals, but a transition to digital television is expected to be completed worldwide by the late 2010s. A standard television set is composed of multiple internal electronic circuits, including a tuner for receiving and decoding broadcast signals. A visual display device which lacks a tuner is called a video monitor rather than a television.
The word television comes from Ancient Greek τῆλε, meaning'far', Latin visio, meaning'sight'. The first documented usage of the term dates back to 1900, when the Russian scientist Constantin Perskyi used it in a paper that he presented in French at the 1st International Congress of Electricity, which ran from 18 to 25 August 1900 during the International World Fair in Paris; the Anglicised version of the term is first attested in 1907, when it was still "...a theoretical system to transmit moving images over telegraph or telephone wires". It was "...formed in English or borrowed from French télévision." In the 19th century and early 20th century, other "...proposals for the name of a then-hypothetical technology for sending pictures over distance were telephote and televista." The abbreviation "TV" is from 1948. The use of the term to mean "a television set" dates from 1941; the use of the term to mean "television as a medium" dates from 1927. The slang term "telly" is more common in the UK; the slang term "the tube" or the "boob tube" derives from the bulky cathode ray tube used on most TVs until the advent of flat-screen TVs.
Another slang term for the TV is "idiot box". In the 1940s and throughout the 1950s, during the early rapid growth of television programming and television-set ownership in the United States, another slang term became used in that period and continues to be used today to distinguish productions created for broadcast on television from films developed for presentation in movie theaters; the "small screen", as both a compound adjective and noun, became specific references to television, while the "big screen" was used to identify productions made for theatrical release. Facsimile transmission systems for still photographs pioneered methods of mechanical scanning of images in the early 19th century. Alexander Bain introduced the facsimile machine between 1843 and 1846. Frederick Bakewell demonstrated a working laboratory version in 1851. Willoughby Smith discovered the photoconductivity of the element selenium in 1873; as a 23-year-old German university student, Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow proposed and patented the Nipkow disk in 1884.
This was a spinning disk with a spiral pattern of holes in it, so each hole scanned a line of the image. Although he never built a working model
Melanesia
Melanesia is a subregion of Oceania extending from New Guinea island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean to the Arafura Sea, eastward to Fiji. The region includes the four independent countries of Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, as well as the French special collectivity of New Caledonia, the Indonesian region of Western New Guinea. Most of the region is in the Southern Hemisphere, with a few small northwestern islands of Western New Guinea in the Northern Hemisphere; the name Melanesia was first used by Jules Dumont d'Urville in 1832 to denote an ethnic and geographical grouping of islands whose inhabitants he thought were distinct from those of Micronesia and Polynesia. The name Melanesia, from Greek μέλας, νῆσος, etymologically means "islands of black ", in reference to the dark skin of the inhabitants; the concept among Europeans of Melanesia as a distinct region evolved over time as their expeditions mapped and explored the Pacific. Early European explorers noted the physical differences among groups of Pacific Islanders.
In 1756 Charles de Brosses theorized that there was an "old black race" in the Pacific who were conquered or defeated by the peoples of what is now called Polynesia, whom he distinguished as having lighter skin. In the first half of the nineteenth century Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent and Jules Dumont d'Urville identified Melanesians as a distinct racial group. Over time, Europeans viewed Melanesia as a distinct cultural, rather than racial, area. Scholars and other commentators disagreed on its boundaries. In the nineteenth century Robert Codrington, a British missionary, produced a series of monographs on "the Melanesians" based on his long-time residence in the region. In works including The Melanesian Languages and The Melanesians: Studies in Their Anthropology and Folk-lore, Codrington defined Melanesia as including Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Fiji, he did not include the islands of New Guinea. Like Bory de Saint-Vincent, he excluded Australia from Melanesia, it was in these works.
Uncertainty about the delineation and definition of the region continues. The scholarly consensus now includes New Guinea within Melanesia. Ann Chowning wrote in her 1977 textbook on Melanesia that there is no general agreement among anthropologists about the geographical boundaries of Melanesia. Many apply the term only to the smaller islands, excluding New Guinea. In 1998 Paul Sillitoe wrote of Melanesia: "it is not easy to define on geographical, biological, or any other grounds, where Melanesia ends and the neighbouring regions... begins". He concludes that the region is a historical category which evolved in the nineteenth century from the discoveries made in the Pacific and has been legitimated by use and further research in the region, it covers populations that have a certain linguistic and cultural affinity – a certain ill-defined sameness, which shades off at its margins into difference. Both Sillitoe and Chowning include the island of New Guinea in the definition of Melanesia, both exclude Australia.
Most of the peoples in Melanesia have established independent countries, are administered by France or have active independence movements. Many have taken up the term'Melanesia' as a source of identity and "empowerment". Stephanie Lawson writes that the term "moved from a term of denigration to one of affirmation, providing a positive basis for contemporary subregional identity as well as a formal organisation". For instance, the author Bernard Narokobi wrote about the "Melanesian Way" as a distinct form of culture that could empower the people of this region; the concept is used in geopolitics. For instance, the Melanesian Spearhead Group preferential trade agreement is a regional trade treaty among Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Fiji; the people of Melanesia have a distinctive ancestry. Along with the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia, the Southern Dispersal theory indicates they emigrated from Africa between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago and dispersed along the southern edge of Asia.
The limit of this ancient migration was Sahul, the continent formed when Australia and New Guinea were united by a land bridge as a result of low sea levels. The first migration into Sahul came over 40,000 years ago. A further expansion into the eastern islands of Melanesia came much probably between 4000 B. C. and 3000 B. C. Along the north coast of New Guinea and in the islands north and east of New Guinea, the Austronesian people, who had migrated into the area somewhat more than 3,000 years ago, came into contact with these pre-existing populations of Papuan-speaking peoples. In the late 20th century, some scholars theorized a long period of interaction, which resulted in many complex changes in genetics and culture among the peoples; this Polynesian theory, however, is somewhat contradicted by the findings of a genetic study published by Temple University in 2008. It found that neither Micronesians have much genetic relation to Melanesians, it appeared that, having developed their sailing outrigger canoes, the ancestors of the Polynesians migrated from East Asia, moved through the Melanesian area on their way, kept going to eastern areas, where they settled.
They left little genetic evidence in Melanesia and "only intermixed to
President of Vanuatu
The President of Vanuatu is the head of state of Vanuatu. The President is elected for a five-year term by an electoral college consisting of Parliament and the presidents of the regional councils; the President's role is ceremonial. One function reserved to him or her by the Constitution is the appointment of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, three other justices. In case of vacancy, the Speaker of the Parliament will be acting President. From 1906 to 1980 the List of Resident Commissioners of the New Hebrides was held by British and French colonial officials. From 1887 to 1906 the New Hebrides was led by Anglo-French Joint Naval Commissioners. Vanuatu Politics of Vanuatu List of colonial heads of Vanuatu Prime Minister of Vanuatu Lists of Incumbents
This article incorporates public domain material from the CIA World Factbook website https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html.
