1.
1983
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The year 1983 saw both the official beginning of the Internet and the first mobile cellular telephone call. January 1 – The migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP is officially completed, January 3 – Kīlauea begins slowly erupting on the Big Island of Hawaii and is still flowing as of 2016. January 10 – Canada and the United States launch Jim Hensons Fraggle Rock, January 19 – High-ranking Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie is arrested in Bolivia. January 24 – Twenty-five members of the Red Brigades are sentenced to imprisonment for the 1978 murder of Aldo Moro. January 25 – IRAS is launched from Vandenberg AFB, to conduct the worlds first all-sky infrared survey from space, January 26 – Lotus 1-2-3 is released for IBM PC compatible computers. January 30 – Washington Redskins beat the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XVII January 31 – Seatbelt use for drivers, February 2 – Giovanni Vigliotto goes on trial for multiple counts of bigamy involving 105 women. February 3 Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser is granted a dissolution of both houses of parliament, for elections the next day. Bob Hawke replaces Bill Hayden as leader of the Australian Labor Party, February 5 and 6 The team of A. J. Foyt Preston Henn Bob Wollek and Claude Ballot-Lena won the 24 hours of Daytona in a Porshche 935 February 6 – Klaus Barbie is officially charged with war crimes, February 12 –100 women protest in Lahore, Pakistan, against military dictator Zia-ul-Haqs proposed Law of Evidence. The women were tear-gassed, baton-charged and thrown into lock-up, the women were successful in repealing the law. February 13 – A cinema fire in Turin, Italy, kills 64 people, February 13 – Two US Marshals are killed and three lawmen are wounded in a shootout with Gordon Kahl in Medina, North Dakota. February 16 – The Ash Wednesday bushfires in Victoria and South Australia claim the lives of 75 people, February 18 The Venezuelan bolívar is devaluated and exchange controls are established in an event now referred to as Black Friday by many Venezuelans. Nellie massacre, Over 2,000 people, mostly Bangladeshi Muslims, are massacred in Assam, India, wah Mee massacre,13 people are killed in an attempted robbery in Seattle, Washington. The automatic shut-down fails at Salem Nuclear Power Plant, New Jersey, February 24 A special commission of the Congress of the United States releases a report critical of the practice of Japanese internment during World War II. Bermondsey by-election,1983, Simon Hughess defeat of Peter Tatchell is criticised for alleged homophobia, February 28 – The final episode of M*A*S*H airs, setting a record for most watched television episode and reaching a total audience estimated at 125 million. March 1 – The Balearic Islands and Madrid become Autonomous communities of Spain, march 5 – Bob Hawke is elected Prime Minister of Australia, ending over 7 years of Conservative rule under Malcolm Fraser. March 8 – IBM releases the IBM PC XT, march 9 Anne Burford resigns as head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency amid scandal. The 3D printer is invented by Chuck Hull, march 11 – Australias First Hawke Ministry is sworn in, Andrew Peacock becomes Federal Opposition leader
2.
Mail art
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Mail art is a populist artistic movement centered on sending small scale works through the postal service. It initially developed out of the Fluxus movement in the 1950s and 60s, Mail art is considered art once it is dispatched. Mail artists regularly call for thematic or topical mail art for use in exhibition, Mail artists appreciate interconnection with other artists. The artform promotes a way of creating that frequently circumvents official art distribution and approval systems such as the art market, museums. Mail artists rely on their alternative outsider network as the way of sharing their work, rather than being dependent on the ability to locate. Mail art can be seen as anticipating the cyber communities founded on the Internet, artist Edward M. Plunkett has argued that communication-as-art-form is an ancient tradition, he posits that mail art began when Cleopatra had herself delivered to Julius Caesar in a rolled-up carpet. The American artist Ray Johnson is considered to be the first mail artist, the term mail art was coined in the 1960s. In 1962, Plunkett coined the term New York Correspondence School to refer to Johnsons activities, Johnson adopted this moniker, the deliberate misspelling was characteristic of the playful spirit of the Correspondance School and its actions. Johnsons work consists primarily of letters, often with the addition of doodles and rubber stamped messages, the Correspondance School was a network of individuals who were artists by virtue of their willingness to play along and appreciate Johnsons sense of humor. One example of the activities of the Correspondance School consisted in calling meetings of fan clubs, many of Johnsons missives to his network featured a hand drawn version of what became a personal logo or alter-ego, a bunny head. Correspondence is a way to convey a message or a kind of idea to someone which is not verbal and its an object which is opened in privacy, probably, and the message is looked at. You look at the object and, depending on degree of interest. In 1970, Johnson and Marcia Tucker organized The New York Correspondence School Exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York, however, he continued to practice mail art even after this. Although much of Johnsons work was given away, this hasnt prevented it from attaining a market value. Andy Warhol is quoted as saying he would pay ten dollars for anything by Johnson, in his 1973 diagram showing the development and scope of Fluxus, George Maciunas included mail art among the activities pursued by the Fluxus artist Robert Filliou. Filliou coined the term the Eternal Network that has become synonymous with mail art, other Fluxus artists have been involved since the early 1960s in the creation of artists postage stamps, postcards and other works connected to the postal medium. Indeed, the art network counts many Fluxus members among its earliest participants. While Johnson did not consider himself directly as a member of the Fluxus school, his interests, in the 1970s, the practice of mail art grew considerably, providing a cheap and flexible channel of expression for cultural outsiders
3.
Photography
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Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure. With an electronic sensor, this produces an electrical charge at each pixel. A negative image on film is used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print. The word photography was created from the Greek roots φωτός, genitive of φῶς, light and γραφή representation by means of lines or drawing, several people may have coined the same new term from these roots independently. Johann von Maedler, a Berlin astronomer, is credited in a 1932 German history of photography as having used it in an article published on 25 February 1839 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung. Both of these claims are now widely reported but apparently neither has ever been confirmed as beyond reasonable doubt. Credit has traditionally given to Sir John Herschel both for coining the word and for introducing it to the public. Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries, later Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid also independently described a pinhole camera in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Daniele Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1566, wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals in 1694. The fiction book Giphantie, published in 1760, by French author Tiphaigne de la Roche, the discovery of the camera obscura that provides an image of a scene dates back to ancient China. Leonardo da Vinci mentions natural camera obscura that are formed by dark caves on the edge of a sunlit valley, a hole in the cave wall will act as a pinhole camera and project a laterally reversed, upside down image on a piece of paper. So the birth of photography was primarily concerned with inventing means to capture, renaissance painters used the camera obscura which, in fact, gives the optical rendering in color that dominates Western Art. The camera obscura literally means dark chamber in Latin and it is a box with a hole in it which allows light to go through and create an image onto the piece of paper. Around the year 1800, British inventor Thomas Wedgwood made the first known attempt to capture the image in a camera obscura by means of a light-sensitive substance and he used paper or white leather treated with silver nitrate. The shadow images eventually darkened all over, the first permanent photoetching was an image produced in 1822 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, but it was destroyed in a later attempt to make prints from it. Niépce was successful again in 1825, in 1826 or 1827, he made the View from the Window at Le Gras, the earliest surviving photograph from nature. Because Niépces camera photographs required a long exposure, he sought to greatly improve his bitumen process or replace it with one that was more practical. With an eye to eventual commercial exploitation, the partners opted for total secrecy, Daguerres efforts culminated in what would later be named the daguerreotype process
4.
Soviet Bloc
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The Eastern Bloc was the group of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact. The terms Communist Bloc and Soviet Bloc were also used to denote groupings of states aligned with the Soviet Union, although these terms might include states outside Central and Eastern Europe. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who viewed the Soviet Union as a socialist island, Eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia in northern Romania were recognized as parts of the Soviet sphere of influence. Lithuania was added in a secret protocol in September 1939. During the Occupation of East Poland by the Soviet Union, the Soviets liquidated the Polish state, Soviet authorities immediately started a campaign of sovietization of the newly Soviet-annexed areas. Soviet authorities collectivized agriculture, and nationalized and redistributed private and state-owned Polish property, the international community condemned this initial annexation of the Baltic states and deemed it illegal. In June 1941, Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact by invading the Soviet Union, from the time of this invasion to 1944, the areas annexed by the Soviet Union were part of Germanys Ostland. Thereafter, the Soviet Union began to push German forces westward through a series of battles on the Eastern Front, from 1943 to 1945, several conferences regarding Post-War Europe occurred that, in part, addressed the potential Soviet annexation and control of countries in Central Europe. I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he wont try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace. While meeting with Stalin and Roosevelt in Tehran in 1943, Churchill stated that Britain was vitally interested in restoring Poland as an independent country, Britain did not press the matter for fear that it would become a source of inter-allied friction. In February 1945, at the conference at Yalta, Stalin demanded a Soviet sphere of influence in Central Europe. Stalin eventually was convinced by Churchill and Roosevelt not to dismember Germany, after resistance by Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin promised a re-organization of the current pro-Soviet government on a broader democratic basis in Poland. He stated that the new primary task would be to prepare elections. In addition to reparations, Stalin pushed for war booty, which would permit the Soviet Union to directly seize property from conquered nations without quantitative or qualitative limitation, a clause was added permitting this to occur with some limitations. At first, the Soviets concealed their role in other Eastern Bloc politics, as a young communist was told in East Germany, its got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control. Moscow-trained cadres were put into crucial power positions to fulfill orders regarding sociopolitical transformation, elimination of the bourgeoisies social and financial power by expropriation of landed and industrial property was accorded absolute priority. These measures were publicly billed as reforms rather than socioeconomic transformations, the bloc system permitted the Soviet Union to exercise domestic control indirectly. Crucial departments such as responsible for personnel, general police, secret police
5.
Eastern Europe
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Eastern Europe, also known as East Europe, is the eastern part of the European continent. There is no consensus on the area it covers, partly because the term has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, cultural. There are almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region, a related United Nations paper adds that every assessment of spatial identities is essentially a social and cultural construct. One definition describes Eastern Europe as an entity, the region lying in Europe with main characteristics consisting in Byzantine, Orthodox. Another definition was created during the Cold War and used more or less synonymously with the term Eastern Bloc, a similar definition names the formerly communist European states outside the Soviet Union as Eastern Europe. Historians and social scientists generally view such definitions as outdated or relegating, several definitions of Eastern Europe exist today, but they often lack precision or are extremely general. These definitions vary both across cultures and among experts, even scientists, recently becoming more and more imprecise. The Ural Mountains, Ural River, and the Caucasus Mountains are the land border of the eastern edge of Europe. Eurovoc, a multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union, provides entries for 23 EU languages, of these, those in italics are classified as Eastern Europe in this source. Other official web-pages of the European Union classify some of the countries as strictly Central European. The East–West Schism is the break of communion and theology between what are now the Eastern and Western churches which began in the 11th century and lasts until this very day and it divided Christianity in Europe, and consequently the world, into Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity. Since the Great Schism of 1054, Europe has been divided between Roman Catholic and Protestant churches in the West, and the Eastern Orthodox Christian churches in the east, due to this religious cleavage, Eastern Orthodox countries are often associated with Eastern Europe. A cleavage of this sort is, however, often problematic, for example, Greece is overwhelmingly Orthodox, the fall of the Iron Curtain brought the end of the East–West division in Europe, but this geopolitical concept is sometimes still used for quick reference by the media. The Baltic states have seats in the Nordic Council as observer states and they also are members of the Nordic-Baltic Eight whereas Eastern European countries formed their own alliance called the Visegrád Group. Estonia Latvia Lithuania The Caucasus nations may be included in the definitions of Eastern Europe, the extent of their geographic or political affiliation with Europe varies by country and source. All three states are members of the European Unions Eastern Partnership program and the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly, on 12 January 2002, the European Parliament noted that Armenia and Georgia may enter the EU in the future. Georgia — in modern geography, Georgia has been classified as part of Eastern Europe. Under the European Union’s geographic criteria, Georgia is viewed as part of Eastern Europe and is the only Caucasus country to be actively seeking EU membership and it is a member of Council of Europe and Eurocontrol
6.
South America
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South America is a continent located in the western hemisphere, mostly in the southern hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the northern hemisphere. It may also be considered a subcontinent of the Americas, which is the used in nations that speak Romance languages. The reference to South America instead of other regions has increased in the last decades due to changing geopolitical dynamics. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east by the Atlantic Ocean, North America and it includes twelve sovereign states, a part of France, and a non-sovereign area. In addition to this, the ABC islands of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Trinidad and Tobago, South America has an area of 17,840,000 square kilometers. Its population as of 2005 has been estimated at more than 371,090,000, South America ranks fourth in area and fifth in population. Brazil is by far the most populous South American country, with more than half of the population, followed by Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela. In recent decades Brazil has also concentrated half of the regions GDP and has become a first regional power, most of the population lives near the continents western or eastern coasts while the interior and the far south are sparsely populated. Most of the continent lies in the tropics, the continents cultural and ethnic outlook has its origin with the interaction of indigenous peoples with European conquerors and immigrants and, more locally, with African slaves. Given a long history of colonialism, the majority of South Americans speak Portuguese or Spanish. South America occupies the portion of the Americas. The continent is delimited on the northwest by the Darién watershed along the Colombia–Panama border. Almost all of mainland South America sits on the South American Plate, South Americas major mineral resources are gold, silver, copper, iron ore, tin, and petroleum. These resources found in South America have brought high income to its countries especially in times of war or of rapid growth by industrialized countries elsewhere. However, the concentration in producing one major export commodity often has hindered the development of diversified economies and this is leading to efforts to diversify production to drive away from staying as economies dedicated to one major export. South America is one of the most biodiverse continents on earth, South America is home to many interesting and unique species of animals including the llama, anaconda, piranha, jaguar, vicuña, and tapir. The Amazon rainforests possess high biodiversity, containing a proportion of the Earths species. Brazil is the largest country in South America, encompassing around half of the land area
7.
Asia
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Asia covers an area of 44,579,000 square kilometres, about 30% of Earths total land area and 8. 7% of the Earths total surface area. The continent, which has long been home to the majority of the population, was the site of many of the first civilizations. Asia is notable for not only its large size and population. In general terms, Asia is bounded on the east by the Pacific Ocean, on the south by the Indian Ocean, the western boundary with Europe is a historical and cultural construct, as there is no clear physical and geographical separation between them. The most commonly accepted boundaries place Asia to the east of the Suez Canal, the Ural River, and the Ural Mountains, and south of the Caucasus Mountains, China and India alternated in being the largest economies in the world from 1 to 1800 A. D. The accidental discovery of America by Columbus in search for India demonstrates this deep fascination, the Silk Road became the main East-West trading route in the Asian hitherland while the Straits of Malacca stood as a major sea route. Asia has exhibited economic dynamism as well as robust population growth during the 20th century, given its size and diversity, the concept of Asia—a name dating back to classical antiquity—may actually have more to do with human geography than physical geography. Asia varies greatly across and within its regions with regard to ethnic groups, cultures, environments, economics, historical ties, the boundary between Asia and Africa is the Red Sea, the Gulf of Suez, and the Suez Canal. This makes Egypt a transcontinental country, with the Sinai peninsula in Asia, the border between Asia and Europe was historically defined by European academics. In Sweden, five years after Peters death, in 1730 Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published a new atlas proposing the Urals as the border of Asia, the Russians were enthusiastic about the concept, which allowed them to keep their European identity in geography. Tatishchev announced that he had proposed the idea to von Strahlenberg, the latter had suggested the Emba River as the lower boundary. Over the next century various proposals were made until the Ural River prevailed in the mid-19th century, the border had been moved perforce from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea into which the Ural River projects. The border between the Black Sea and the Caspian is usually placed along the crest of the Caucasus Mountains, the border between Asia and the loosely defined region of Oceania is usually placed somewhere in the Malay Archipelago. The terms Southeast Asia and Oceania, devised in the 19th century, have had several different geographic meanings since their inception. The chief factor in determining which islands of the Malay Archipelago are Asian has been the location of the possessions of the various empires there. Lewis and Wigen assert, The narrowing of Southeast Asia to its present boundaries was thus a gradual process, Asia is larger and more culturally diverse than Europe. It does not exactly correspond to the borders of its various types of constituents. From the time of Herodotus a minority of geographers have rejected the three-continent system on the grounds there is no or is no substantial physical separation between them
