Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer and fine arts educator. He is acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art history. For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some 40 years Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia, he painted several hundred portraits of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences and clergy. Taken en masse, the portraits offer an overview of the intellectual life of Philadelphia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition, Eakins produced a number of large paintings that brought the portrait out of the drawing room and into the offices, parks, rivers and surgical amphitheaters of his city; these active outdoor venues allowed him to paint the subject that most inspired him: the nude or clad figure in motion. In the process, he could model the forms of the body in full sunlight, create images of deep space utilizing his studies in perspective.

Eakins took a keen interest in the new technologies of motion photography, a field in which he is now seen as an innovator. No less important in Eakins' life was his work as a teacher; as an instructor he was a influential presence in American art. The difficulties which beset him as an artist seeking to paint the portrait and figure realistically were paralleled and amplified in his career as an educator, where behavioral and sexual scandals truncated his success and damaged his reputation. Eakins was a controversial figure whose work received little by way of official recognition during his lifetime. Since his death, he has been celebrated by American art historians as "the strongest, most profound realist in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American art". Eakins was lived most of his life in Philadelphia, he was the first child of Caroline Cowperthwait Eakins, a woman of English and Dutch descent, Benjamin Eakins, a writing master and calligraphy teacher of Scots-Irish ancestry. Benjamin Eakins grew up on a farm in Valley Forge, the son of a weaver.

He was successful in his chosen profession, moved to Philadelphia in the early 1840s to raise his family. Thomas Eakins observed his father at work and by twelve demonstrated skill in precise line drawing and the use of a grid to lay out a careful design, skills he applied to his art, he was an athletic child who enjoyed rowing, ice skating, wrestling and gymnastics—activities he painted and encouraged in his students. Eakins attended Central High School, the premier public school for applied science and arts in the city, where he excelled in mechanical drawing. Thomas met fellow artist and lifelong friend, Charles Lewis Fussell in high school and they reunited to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Thomas began at the academy in 1861 and attended courses in anatomy and dissection at Jefferson Medical College from 1864 to 65. For a while, he followed his father's profession and was listed in city directories as a "writing teacher", his scientific interest in the human body led him to consider becoming a surgeon.

Eakins studied art in Europe from 1866 to 1870, notably in Paris with Jean-Léon Gérôme, being only the second American pupil of the French realist painter, famous as a master of Orientalism. He attended the atelier of Léon Bonnat, a realist painter who emphasized anatomical preciseness, a method adapted by Eakins. While studying at the École des Beaux-Arts, he seems to have taken scant interest in the new Impressionist movement, nor was he impressed by what he perceived as the classical pretensions of the French Academy. A letter home to his father in 1868 made his aesthetic clear: She is the most beautiful thing there is in the world except a naked man, but I never yet saw a study of one exhibited... It would be a godsend to see a fine man model painted in the studio with the bare walls, alongside of the smiling smirking goddesses of waxy complexion amidst the delicious arsenic green trees and gentle wax flowers & purling streams running melodious up & down the hills up. I hate affectation.

At age 24, "nudity and verity were linked with an unusual closeness in his mind." Yet his desire for truthfulness was more expansive, the letters home to Philadelphia reveal a passion for realism that included, but was not limited to, the study of the figure. A trip to Spain for six months confirmed his admiration for the realism of artists such as Diego Velázquez and Jusepe de Ribera. In Seville in 1869 he painted Carmelita Requeña, a portrait of a seven-year-old gypsy dancer more and colorfully painted than his Paris studies; that same year he attempted his first large oil painting, A Street Scene in Seville, wherein he first dealt with the complications of a scene observed outside the studio. Although he failed to matriculate in a formal degree program and had showed no works in the European salons, Eakins succeeded in absorbing the techniques and methods of French and Spanish masters, he began to formulate his artistic vision which he demonstrated in his first major painting upon his return to America.

"I shall seek to achieve my broad effect from the beginning", he declared. Eakins' first works upon his return from Europe included a large group of rowing scenes, eleven oils and watercolors in all, of which the first and most famous is Max Schmitt in a Single Scull. Both his subject and his technique drew attention, his selection of a contemporary sport was "a shock to the art

Jenny Preece is an American academic, the Dean Emerita of the College of Information Studies, a Professor at the University of Maryland, a member of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. She researches online communities and is known for her work on what makes such a community successful, how usability factors interact with sociability in online communities. Preece gained her Ph. D. at the Open University becoming faculty there. She went on to be a Research Professor of Information Systems and founding Director of the Research Center for People and Systems Interaction at London South Bank University in London. At the University of Maryland, she has studied how online communities can stimulate and support social engagement, her current work is on citizen science and environmental education. Her work is described in Encounters with HCI Pioneers: Photo Journal. Jennifer Preece, Yvonne Rogers & Helen Sharp: Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Edition, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-470-01866-6.

3rd Edition, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 9780470665763. 4th Edition, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 978-1-119-02075-2, 5th John Wiley & Sons. Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability, John Wiley & Sons ISBN 0-471-80599-8 Human-Computer Interaction co-author, with Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp, David Benyon, Simon Holland, Tom Carey, ISBN 0-201-62769-8 Jenny Preecea, Blair Nonneckeb, Dorine Andrewsc: The top five reasons for lurking: improving community experiences for everyone Preece has published papers on trust and online etiquette, including the transition of readers and participants to community leaders. In 2011 she was selected to join the CHI Academy. A longer list of Preece's published work Wikimania 2006 bio Jennifer Preece's iSchool profile page at University of Maryland College Park

Girls & Sports was an American comic strip written and illustrated by Justin Borus and Andrew Feinstein. It was created in 1997 and published in various college newspapers until 2004 when Borus and Feinstein began self-syndicating the strip, it was picked up for distributed by Creators Syndicate at the beginning of 2006, was discontinued in 2011. Borus and Feinstein created Sports in 1997 while studying abroad in Denmark; the strips were based on their own dating experiences. When they returned to the United States, they began publishing their comic in their college newspapers. After college and Feinstein began marketing the comic to mainstream newspapers, which became the most syndicated independent comic strip in the country. From January 2010 to March 2011 the strip appeared on ESPN's Page 2. In May 2011, the strip was discontinued with brief mention by one of websites that featured the comic; the last daily strip appeared April 30 2011 and the last Sunday strip appeared May 8. In the summer of 2008, Girls & Sports appeared as a series of animated short cartoons on Fox Sports Net's late night talk show The Best Damn Sports Show Period.

Girls & Sports deals with the dating lives of two men and Marshall. Bradley is dating Joann but is not against going to the bar and hitting on other women, though he remains loyal to Joann. Marshall is the perpetual single guy who listens to Bradley's advice when it's against his better judgment. Joann thinks. Opening Lines, Pinky Probes and L-Bombs: The Girls & Sports Dating and Relationship Playbook, ISBN 1-59580-015-8, published October 28, 2006, is a comic anthology on the events and circumstances that confront singles in their everyday lives, including dating, the bar scene, working out and vacations in the style of the Girls & Sports strips, it offers advice via charts and text boxes. Girls & Sports at Creators Syndicate ESPN Cold Pizza Feature on YouTube G4 Attack of the Show Feature on YouTube National Cartoonists Society: Justin Borus National Cartoonists Society: Andrew Feinstein https://archive.is/20060814030955/http://www.athensnews.com/girlsandsports.php http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001701211 https://web.archive.org/web/20070216021930/http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/living/11884495.htm http://www.jg-tc.com/articles/2007/01/11/features/features001.txt