Western is a genre of fiction which tells stories set in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West centering on the life of a nomadic cowboy or gunfighter armed with a revolver and a rifle who rides a horse. Cowboys and gunslingers wear Stetson hats, neckerchief bandannas, spurs, cowboy boots, buckskins. Recurring characters include the aforementioned cowboys, Native Americans, Mexicans, lawmen, bounty hunters, gamblers and settlers; the ambience is punctuated with a Western music score, including American and Spanish/Mexican folk music such as country, Native American music, New Mexico music, rancheras. Westerns stress the harshness of the wilderness and set the action in an arid, desolate landscape of deserts and mountains; the vast landscape plays an important role, presenting a "mythic vision of the plains and deserts of the American West." Specific settings include ranches, small frontier towns, railways and isolated military forts of the Wild West. Common plots include: The construction of a telegraph line on the wild frontier.

Ranchers protecting their family ranch from rustlers or large landowners, or who build a ranch empire. Revenge stories, which hinge on the chase and pursuit by someone, wronged. Stories about cavalry fighting Native Americans. Outlaw gang plots. Stories about a lawman or bounty hunter tracking down his quarry. Many Westerns use a stock plot of depicting a crime showing the pursuit of the wrongdoer, ending in revenge and retribution, dispensed through a shootout or quick-draw duel; the Western has been recognized as the most popular Hollywood film genre of the early 20th century through the 1960s. Western films first became well-attended in the 1930s. John Ford's landmark Western film Stagecoach became one of the biggest hits of that year, made John Wayne a mainstream movie star; the popularity of Westerns continued to grow in the 1940s, with the release of films such as The Ox-Bow Incident, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, Red River. The 1950s have been described as the "Golden Age of the Western," and saw the release of films such as Broken Arrow, High Noon, Wichita, The Searchers, Rio Bravo.

Notable Western films released in the 1960s include Cat Ballou, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Classic Westerns such as these have been the inspiration for various films about Western-type characters in contemporary settings, such as Junior Bonner, set in the 1970s, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, set in the 21st century; the Western genre sometimes portrays the conquest of the wilderness and the subordination of nature in the name of civilization or the confiscation of the territorial rights of the original, Native American, inhabitants of the frontier. The Western depicts a society organized around codes of honor and personal, direct or private justice–"frontier justice"–dispensed by gunfights; these honor codes are played out through depictions of feuds or individuals seeking personal revenge or retribution against someone who has wronged them. This Western depiction of personal justice contrasts with justice systems organized around rationalistic, abstract law that exist in cities, in which social order is maintained predominately through impersonal institutions such as courtrooms.

The popular perception of the Western is a story that centers on the life of a semi-nomadic wanderer a cowboy or a gunfighter. A showdown or duel at high noon featuring two or more gunfighters is a stereotypical scene in the popular conception of Westerns. In some ways, such protagonists may be considered the literary descendants of the knights errant which stood at the center of earlier extensive genres such as the Arthurian Romances. Like the cowboy or gunfighter of the Western, the knight errant of the earlier European tales and poetry was wandering from place to place on his horse, fighting villains of various kinds and bound to no fixed social structures, but only to their own innate code of honor, and like knights errant, the heroes of Westerns rescue damsels in distress. The wandering protagonists of Westerns share many characteristics with the ronin in modern Japanese culture; the Western takes these elements and uses them to tell simple morality tales, although some notable examples are more morally ambiguous.

Westerns stress the harshness and isolation of the wilderness and set the action in an arid, desolate landscape. Western films have specific settings such as isolated ranches, Native American villages, or small frontier towns with a saloon. Oftentimes, these settings appear deserted and without much structure. Apart from the wilderness, it is the saloon that emphasizes that this is the Wild West: it is the place to go for music, gambling, drinking and shooting. In some Westerns, where civilization has arrived, the town has a church, a general store, a bank and a school; the American Film Institute defines Western films as those "set in the American West that the spirit, the stru

Social Science Computer Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal that covers the use of computers in the field of social science, including artificial intelligence, computer simulation, electronic modelling. The editors-in-chief are Ronald Anderson, it was established in 1983 and is published by Sage Publications in association with the Social Science Computing Association. The journal is indexed in Scopus and the Social Sciences Citation Index. According to the Journal Citation Reports, its 2017 impact factor is 3.253, ranking it 20th out of 105 journals in the category "Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications", 2nd out of 98 journals in the category "Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary", 14th out of 88 journals in the category "Information Science & Library Science". Official website

The Sri Lanka Transport Board is a bus service provider in Sri Lanka. Between 1958 and 1978, the Ceylon Transport Board was the nationalised enterprise which handled all public bus transport in Sri Lanka. At its peak, it was the largest omnibus company in the world — with about 7,000 buses and over 50,000 employees. With privatization in 1979, it underwent a period of decline. First broken up into several regional boards into several companies, it was reconstituted as the Sri Lanka Transport Board in 2005. In 2016, the number of buses in the fleet was 7769. In the same year, SLTB had a total of 32,640 employees; the first motor omnibus in Sri Lanka was imported in 1907 and bus transport began in Sri Lanka as an owner-operated service. There was no regulation, so when more than one bus operated on a single route, there was a scramble for the load. By the mid-1930s, malpractices in pursuit of maximum profit began to compromise comfort; the setting up of the limited liability omnibus companies by the British around 1940 was the first meaningful step in regularising public passenger transport in the country.

The Ratnam Survey in 1948, the Sansoni Survey in 1954 and the Jayaratna Perera Survey in 1956 studied the bus services in Sri Lanka and all recommended that the companies should be nationalised. The history of Sri Lanka Transport Board goes back to 1 January 1958; the inaugural trip of the CTB took the Prime Minister and the Transport and Works Minister Maithripala Senanayake on a maroon luxury Mercedes-Benz bus imported from Germany. The bus is still owned by the Nittambuwa Bus Depot. At its peak, it was the largest omnibus company in the world — with about 7,000 buses and over 50,000 employees. With privatization in 1979, it underwent a period of decline; the creation of a single nationalised entity made possible long distance operations and running buses on a large number of rural routes. First broken up into several regional boards into several companies, it was reconstituted as the Sri Lanka Transport Board in 2005; the move received bipartisan support in Parliament. It was hailed by the Joint Business Forum, which welcomed the revival of the CTB: this was one of the rare occasions on which the business community said a state bus service was better than privatised ventures.

SLTB serves both rural routes. In many rural areas, it provides services in unprofitable areas that would be unattractive to private operators. Colombo has an extensive public transport system based on buses, some of, operated by SLTB; the Central Bus Stand in Pettah functions as the primary hub for bus transport in Colombo. The road network in Colombo consists of radial links, which link the city centre and district centres, orbital links, which intersect the arterial routes. A BRT system for Colombo has yet to be implemented. SLTB serves many intercity routes; these routes connect many of the major population centres in the country. As of January 2012, SLTB is the only bus operator on the Southern Expressway, it uses modern Lanka Ashok Leyland buses on the expressway to connect Galle with Maharagama. The buses operate every two hours; as of 2013, the SLTB has started operating on the Katunayake Expressway providing access for people from Negombo, Puttalam, etc. to maintain access within 20 minutes.

Most of the fleet consists of buses from Lanka Ashok Leyland, Volvo, Tata and Isuzu. The SLTB is expanding its fleet, by ordering new buses from Volvo The buses ordered have modern facilities, including low-floor design and air-conditioning. In July 2011, trial runs began in Colombo to gauge passengers' response to the new buses. Most SLTB buses have a red livery and are recognisable; the CTB painted its buses red and blue. The second-hand London Transport buses, which were the backbone of the fleet, just needed to be half-painted in blue, saving on costs; when aluminium bus bodies became the norm, large areas of the surface were left unpainted, with just red front and back and blue strips down the side, in order to save money. The Logo was a blue oval with the words'CTB' and the equivalents in Sinhala and Tamil painted on it in red. From 1970 this was replaced on field azure; the present SLTB logo returns to the 1970s symbols, but with'SLTB' instead of'CTB' in Roman lettering, with'Sri' added to the Sinhala script and no change in the Tamil script.

SLTB buses compete with private buses throughout the country, as well as with rail services by Sri Lanka Railways. Sri Lanka Transport Board has not integrated its services with other modes of transport, such as rail. Unlike transport systems in some other countries, Sri Lanka does not have a streamline ticket system between road and rail transport. Buses do not provide dedicated feeder-bus services to the railways, resulting in commuter rail and buses acting as isolated systems in relation to each other, which creates a loss in efficiency. Transport in Sri Lanka Sri Lanka Transport Board official website SLTB page at Ministry of Transport website Pictures of decrepit British buses in CTB, RTB and'peoplised' livery, post-1978 Classic Buses Profiles: PUBLIC TRANSPORT IN SRI LANKA, text and pictures