title: Coheed and Cambria

text: Coheed and Cambria toured through most of early 2009. Between January and March, they toured with Slipknot and Trivium on the Slipknot-headlined All Hope Is Gone tour. In August 2009, Coheed and Cambria toured in support of Heaven & Hell on their tour in support of "The Devil You Know". On September 16, 2009, they performed at the Puyallup Fair alongside Brand New and Jaguar Love. In October they performed at the Austin City Limits Music Festival in Austin, Texas. They also performed at the Wacken Open Air festival, at the UK leg of the Sonisphere Festival tour, and at the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: Coheed and Cambria finished recording their fifth studio album "Year of the Black Rainbow" in 2009. It is a prequel to their conceptual story, having events that take place before "The Second Stage Turbine Blade". A novel was released to accompany the album co-written by Sanchez and Peter David. The album was released on April 13, 2010, in both a standard, iTunes special, and deluxe edition (with the deluxe edition including the "Year of the Black Rainbow" novel and a special Year of the Black Rainbow "black card" that provided the holder early access to some Coheed shows. The concept of a special card with this privilege would carry over into future album releases).


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: "The Broken", "Guns of Summer" and "Here We Are Juggernaut" were released on the Rock Band music store on April 20, 2010.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: Sanchez stated that with the Coheed and Cambria saga completely chronicled on the group's first five albums, he was contemplating the direction of future releases. "I've thought of telling stories of the future and stories of the past, maybe getting involved more in the story of Sirius Amory (sic – Sirius Amory in the stories), the fellow who figured out the value of the Keywork," he said. "Or even stories that kind of parallel the one that we’re telling. It’s kind of up in the air. I’ve started writing music for that next record, and I'm kind of hoping that maybe in doing that it's going to tell me which one to do.”


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: On July 10, 2011, bassist Michael Todd was arrested and taken into police custody in Attleboro, Massachusetts on charges of armed robbery. Wes Styles acted as a temporary replacement for the remaining dates. On August 4, 2011, Todd and the band parted ways by mutual decision.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: The band recorded a cover of the ZZ Top song, "Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers", for the tribute album "" and new song "Deranged" was released on the soundtrack for the video game "" on October 18, 2011.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: Claudio announced at New York Comic Con in "Radio.com" in October 2011 that the upcoming album was written and that the recordings would begin in November. He also confirmed that the band were continuing to write music following the Amory Wars storyline, and hinted that fans would be surprised by which character was followed in the new album.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: In November 2011, Chris Pennie departed the band by mutual agreement due to creative differences. Two weeks later, Pennie was replaced by the band's former drummer Josh Eppard, and the following April the band announced via social media that their replacement bassist would be Zach Cooper, previously of the band AM to AM. According to an interview with Cooper, Coheed manager Blaze James "cold-called" Cooper to audition for the bass position, based upon a personal recommendation.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: In June, the band completed the recording of their sixth studio album at Applehead Studios. The following month, Coheed announced via their website that the upcoming album would be a double album called "The Afterman." The first part, titled "", was released on October 9, 2012, and the second, titled "", was released on February 5, 2013. It was produced by Coheed and Cambria, with Michael Birnbaum and Chris Bittner. 'The Afterman' tells the story of Sirius Amory, the namesake of the concept, as he explores the energy source holding together the Keywork (the 78 worlds in which "The Amory Wars" is set) and finds that it is in fact an afterlife for departed souls. In the same month, Claudio announced at San Diego Comic Con that "Entourage" producers Mark Wahlberg and Stephen Levinson would be developing his comic book series "The Amory Wars" into a full-length live action film. In September 2019, Sanchez revealed that Wahlberg's agreement to produce the project had expired.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: On August 28, 2012, the band released the music video for "Key Entity Extraction I: Domino the Destitute", the first single from "The Afterman: Ascension", on their Vevo channel, reaching over one million views. Two weeks before the album's release, the band premiered the studio version of the title track "The Afterman" on "Rolling Stone". The second video from the album was later created for this track. In 2013, the band released videos for "Dark Side of Me" and "Number City", from "The Afterman: Descension".


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: On August 18, 2014, it was revealed on a Billboard.com article that Coheed and Cambria would be releasing a remastered version of "In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3" on October 21, including some interview questions about why they were releasing it, and premiering the remastered version of the single "A Favor House Atlantic" from that album.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: On August 25, 2014, a video of Claudio playing a new song titled "Atlas" was uploaded to the band's YouTube channel.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: In September and October 2014, Coheed and Cambria went on tour with Thank You Scientist, playing "In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3" in its entirety in correspondence with its remastering. In February 2015, it was announced on BBC Radio 1 that the band would be performing "In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3" at Hevy Fest held at Port Lympne, Kent, England.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: In an interview with Claudio Sanchez, he stated that he hoped to take Coheed and Cambria into the studio during January 2015 for a spring or summer release.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: The band's eighth album, "The Color Before the Sun", was released on October 16, 2015. It is the band's first album not connected to "The Amory Wars" storyline. Instead, the album reflects on Sanchez's recent events in his life, which includes moving from the country to the city, his child Atlas (of which a studio version of the song of the same name is found on the album), among others. The album's first single, "You Got Spirit, Kid" was released on July 10, 2015. The second single, "Here to Mars", was released on September 3, 2015.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: The band embarked on an early 2016 U.S. tour with Glassjaw, I the Mighty, and Silver Snakes, and a late 2016 U.S. tour with Saves the Day and Polyphia.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: On August 19, 2016, the band released a Deconstructed version of the album which includes demos of the tracks as well as live recordings.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: It was announced on April 5, 2018, that the band had signed with Roadrunner Records, and released a teaser potentially for a new album set to release in 2018. The band decided to premiere a new song after a show at the Chameleon Club in Lancaster, PA on May 5, 2018. After videos of the song went viral among fans on YouTube the band decided to premiere the video for a new song, "The Dark Sentencer" along with the album's "Prologue" (the album's backstory), on May 31, 2018, against their promotional plan set forth by the new company they signed with, Roadrunner Records. On June 22, 2018, the band announced their new album, "", would be released October 5, 2018. It continues the "Amory Wars" storyline that the band's first seven albums followed. The second song on the album, "Unheavenly Creatures", was released on June 28. A third single, "The Gutter", was released on August 16. A fourth, "Old Flames", was released on September 27. A fifth, "Love Protocol", made its debut on BBC Radio 1 on September 30.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: The band embarked on an early 2019 tour with Maps & Atlases. On February 12, 2019, the band announced The Unheavenly Skye Tour, co-headlined with Mastodon, and featuring special guests Every Time I Die.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: On August 21, 2020, the band released "Jessie's Girl 2", a sequel to Rick Springfield's 1981 song, "Jessie's Girl", featuring Springfield on the recording. The song will be released on both a red and blue 7" vinyl on September 4. According to an article by "Entertainment Weekly", the band reportedly has considered releasing a whole album called "Sequels" entirely composed of sequels to other songs.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: In early 2021, the band announced a tour co-headlining with The Used. On July 21, 2021, they released the lead single, "Shoulders", from their tenth studio album. The album continues the "Amory Wars" "Vaxis" saga from the previous album, though frontman Claudio Sanchez noted that parts of the story were still in flux, as some plot points felt insensitive in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as a song titled "Hallelujah Quarantine" written before the pandemic, centered around a "celebration called The Quarantine. It’s almost like a cotillion where the young come to party and to decide their fates. But this organization is really just taking these young kids to use them as blood banks." On November 10, 2021, the band released their new album's second single, "Rise, Naianasha (Cut the Cord)". In December 2021, the band announced The Great Destroyer Tour with Sheer Mag, to take place in February and March 2022. In January 2022, the band announced the title and track listing of their tenth album: "", released on June 24, 2022. A third single, "The Liars Club", was released on February 22, 2022. The next day, the band announced the A Window of the Waking Mind Tour with Dance Gavin Dance and Mothica. A fourth single, "Comatose", was released on May 18, 2022, and the band added European tour dates with Thrice and Touché Amoré. Due to sexual assault allegations against Dance Gavin Dance singer Tilian Pearson and his departure from the band, Alkaline Trio replaced Dance Gavin Dance on the A Window of the Waking Mind tour.


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: Sanchez has several times stated he is envious of his father's era of music, and that the band is influenced by groups of that era, such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Police, Queen, and Thin Lizzy. Apart from these roots, Sanchez also acknowledges an eclectic array of influences, including post-hardcore group At the Drive-In, and heavy metal pioneers Iron Maiden. One of the biggest influences for Coheed and Cambria was alternative metal band Faith No More. Before they established the band, Sanchez and Stever got hold of its 1992 record "Angel Dust", that Stever claimed it "showed [them] the light", and they would later listen to their next records "King for a Day" and "Album of the Year" continually as well. Frontman Mike Patton mirrors some of Sanchez's vocal melodies, as do several guitar parts. Contrary to rumors, bassist Michael Todd said the band was not influenced by Saga and that he had never heard of that group. Many draw similarities between Rush and Coheed and Cambria, but Josh Eppard stated in an interview that neither he nor the other band members were Rush fans or influenced by Rush. They began listening to Rush after their second album. Influences of punk rock have been cited as well, especially the Misfits and Bad Brains. Dr. Know of Bad Brains plays a guitar solo on the track "Time Consumer" from Second Stage Turbine Blade. Sanchez and Stever's early band Toxic Parents drew many similarities from Jane's Addiction and Misfits. Sanchez has stated that "The Amory Wars", the story on which Coheed and Cambria base its lyrics, has similarities to other stories, especially to the "Star Wars" trilogy. For example, when the character Coheed returns home to his wife Cambria, she says, "Somehow I’ve always known," a line that Princess Leia said to Luke Skywalker in "Return of the Jedi".


title: Coheed and Cambria

text: The band's style is described as progressive rock by Equal Vision, Spin, and AllMusic. Songs such as "Blood Red Summer" and "Three Evils (Embodied in Love and Shadow)" have been noted in many reviews of the band also to contain several elements of pop, as exemplified by one review by Sputnikmusic, which says "Coheed and Cambria manage to bring new life to a dying genre, and mix up the standard pop-punk scheme with creative and original riffs." The band has also been described as alternative rock, new prog, progressive metal, emo, post-hardcore, and alternative metal.


title: Synthesizer

text: A synthesizer (also spelled synthesiser) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and frequency modulation synthesis. These sounds may be altered by components such as filters, which cut or boost frequencies; envelopes, which control articulation, or how notes begin and end; and low-frequency oscillators, which modulate parameters such as pitch, volume, or filter characteristics affecting timbre. Synthesizers are typically played with keyboards or controlled by sequencers, software or other instruments, and may be synchronized to other equipment via MIDI.


title: Synthesizer

text: Synthesizer-like instruments emerged in the United States in the mid-20th century with instruments such as the RCA Mark II, which was controlled with punch cards and used hundreds of vacuum tubes. The Moog synthesizer, developed by Robert Moog and first sold in 1964, is credited for pioneering concepts such as voltage-controlled oscillators, envelopes, noise generators, filters, and sequencers. In 1970, the smaller, cheaper Minimoog standardized synthesizers as self-contained instruments with built-in keyboards, unlike the larger modular synthesizers before it.


title: Synthesizer

text: In 1978, Sequential Circuits released the Prophet-5, which used microprocessors to allow users to store sounds for the first time. 1982 saw the introduction of MIDI, a standardized means of synchronizing electronic instruments that remains an industry standard. The Yamaha DX7, launched in 1983, was a major success and popularized digital synthesis. Software synthesizers now can be run as plug-ins or embedded on microchips.


title: Synthesizer

text: Synthesizers were initially viewed as avant-garde, valued by the 1960s psychedelic and counter-cultural scenes but with little perceived commercial potential. "Switched-On Bach" (1968)"," a bestselling album of Bach compositions arranged for synthesizer by Wendy Carlos, took synthesizers to the mainstream. They were adopted by electronic acts and pop and rock groups in the 1960s and 1970s, and were widely used in 1980s music. Sampling, introduced with the Fairlight synthesizer in 1979, has influenced all genres of music and had a major influence on the development of electronic and hip hop music. Today, the synthesizer is used in nearly every genre of music, and is considered one of the most important instruments in the music industry. According to "Fact" in 2016, "The synthesizer is as important, and as ubiquitous, in modern music today as the human voice."


title: Synthesizer

text: As electricity became more widely available, the early 20th century saw the invention of electronic musical instruments including the Telharmonium, Trautonium, Ondes Martenot, and theremin. In the late 1930s, the Hammond Organ Company built the Novachord, a large instrument powered by 72 voltage-controlled amplifiers and 146 vacuum tubes. In 1948, the Canadian engineer Hugh Le Caine completed the electronic sackbut, a precursor to voltage-controlled synthesizers, with keyboard sensitivity allowing for vibrato, glissando, and attack control.


title: Synthesizer

text: In 1957, Harry Olson and Herbert Belar completed the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer at the RCA laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey. The instrument read punched paper tape that controlled an analog synthesizer containing 750 vacuum tubes. It was acquired by the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and used almost exclusively by Milton Babbitt, a composer at Princeton University.


title: Synthesizer

text: The authors of "Analog Days" define "the early years of the synthesizer" as between 1964 and the mid-1970s, beginning with the debut of the Moog synthesizer. Designed by the American engineer Robert Moog, the synthesizer was composed of separate modules which created and shaped sounds, connected by patch cords. Moog developed a means of controlling pitch through voltage, the voltage-controlled oscillator. This, along with Moog components such as envelopes, noise generators, filters, and sequencers, became standard components in synthesizers.


title: Synthesizer

text: Around the same period, the American engineer Don Buchla created the Buchla Modular Electronic Music System. Instead of a conventional keyboard, Buchla's system used touchplates which transmitted control voltages depending on finger position and force. However, the Moog's keyboard made it more accessible and marketable to musicians, and keyboards became the standard means of controlling synthesizers. Moog and Buchla initially avoided the word synthesizer for their instruments, as it was associated with the RCA synthesizer; however, by the 1970s, "synthesizer" had become the standard term.


title: Synthesizer

text: In 1970, Moog launched a cheaper, smaller synthesizer, the Minimoog. The Minimoog was the first synthesizer sold in music stores, and was more practical for live performance; it standardized the concept of synthesizers as self-contained instruments with built-in keyboards.


title: Synthesizer

text: After retail stores started selling synthesizers in 1971, other synthesizer companies were established, including ARP in the US and EMS in the UK. ARP's products included the ARP 2600, which folded into a carrying case and had built-in speakers, and the Odyssey, a rival to the Minimoog. The less expensive EMS synthesizers were used by European art rock and progressive rock acts including Brian Eno and Pink Floyd. Designs for synthesizers appeared in the amateur electronics market, such as the "Practical Electronics Sound Synthesiser", published in "Practical Electronics" in 1973. By the mid-1970s, ARP was the world's largest synthesizer manufacturer, though it closed in 1981.


title: Synthesizer

text: Early synthesizers were monophonic, meaning they could only play one note at a time. Some of the earliest commercial polyphonic synthesizers were created by the American engineer Tom Oberheim, such as the OB-X (1979). In 1978, the American company Sequential Circuits released the Prophet-5, the first fully programmable polyphonic synthesizer. Whereas previous synthesizers required users to adjust cables and knobs to change sounds, with no guarantee of exactly recreating a sound, the Prophet-5 used microprocessors to store sounds in patch memory. This facilitated a move from synthesizers creating unpredictable sounds to producing "a standard package of familiar sounds".


title: Synthesizer

text: The synthesizer market grew dramatically in the 1980s. 1982 saw the introduction of MIDI, a standardized means of synchronizing electronic instruments; it remains an industry standard. An influential sampling synthesizer, the Fairlight CMI, was released in 1979, with the ability to record and play back samples at different pitches. Though its high price made it inaccessible to amateurs, it was adopted by high-profile pop musicians including Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. The success of the Fairlight drove competition, improving sampling technology and lowering prices. Early competing samplers included the E-mu Emulator in 1981 and the Akai S-series in 1985.


title: Synthesizer

text: In 1983, Yamaha released the first commercially successful digital synthesizer, the Yamaha DX7. Based on frequency modulation (FM) synthesis developed by the Stanford University engineer John Chowning, the DX7 was characterized by its "harsh", "glassy" and "chilly" sounds, compared to the "warm" and "fuzzy" sounds of analog synthesis. The DX7 was the first synthesizer to sell more than 100,000 unitsand remains one of the bestselling in history. It was widely used in 1980s pop music.


title: Synthesizer

text: Digital synthesizers typically contained preset sounds emulating acoustic instruments, with algorithms controlled with menus and buttons. The Synclavier, made with FM technology licensed from Yamaha, offered features such as 16-bit sampling and digital recording. With a starting price of $13,000, its use was limited to universities, studios and wealthy artists. The Roland D-50 (1987) blended Roland's linear arithmetic algorithm with samples, and was the first mass-produced synthesizer with built-in digital effects such as delay, reverb and chorus. In 1988, the Japanese manufacturer Korg released the M1, a digital synthesizer workstation featuring sampled transients and loops. With more than 250,000 units sold, it remains the bestselling synthesizer in history. The advent of digital synthesizers led to a downturn in interest in analog synthesizers.


title: Synthesizer

text: 1997 saw the release of ReBirth by Propellerhead Software and Reality by Seer Systems, the first software synthesizers that could be played in real time via MIDI. In 1999, an update to the music software Cubase allowed users to run software instruments (including synthesizers) as plug-ins, triggering a wave of new software instruments. Propellerhead's Reason, released in 2000, introduced an array of recognizable virtual studio equipment.


title: Synthesizer

text: The market for patchable and modular synthesizers rebounded in the late 1990s. In the 2000s, older analog synthesizers regained popularity, sometimes selling for much more than their original prices. In the 2010s, new, affordable analog synthesizers were introduced by companies including Moog, Korg, Arturia and Dave Smith Instruments. The renewed interest is credited to the appeal of imperfect "organic" sounds and simpler interfaces, and modern surface-mount technology making analog synthesizers cheaper and faster to manufacture.


title: Synthesizer

text: Early synthesizers were viewed as avant-garde, valued by the 1960s psychedelic and counter-cultural scenes for their ability to make new sounds, but with little perceived commercial potential. "Switched-On Bach" (1968)"," a bestselling album of Bach compositions arranged for Moog synthesizer by Wendy Carlos, demonstrated that synthesizers could be more than "random noise machines", taking them to the mainstream. However, debates were held about the appropriateness of synthesizers in baroque music, and according to the "Guardian" they were quickly abandoned in "serious classical circles".


title: Synthesizer

text: Today, the synthesizer is used in nearly every genre of music. It is considered by the authors of "Analog Days" as "the only innovation that can stand alongside the electric guitar as a great new instrument of the age of electricity ... Both led to new forms of music, and both had massive popular appeal." According to "Fact" in 2016, "The synthesizer is as important, and as ubiquitous, in modern music today as the human voice." It is one of the most important instruments in the music industry.


title: Synthesizer

text: The Moog was adopted by 1960s rock acts including the Doors, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Keith Emerson. Emerson was the first major rock musician to perform with the Moog and it became a trademark of his performances, helping take his band Emerson, Lake & Palmer to global stardom. According to "Analog Days", the likes of Emerson, with his Moog performances, "did for the keyboard what Jimi Hendrix did for the guitar".


title: Synthesizer

text: The portable Minimoog (1970), much smaller than the modular synthesizers before it, made synthesizers more common in live performance. Early synthesizers could only play one note at a time, making them suitable for basslines, leads and solos. With the rise of polyphonic synthesizers in the 70s and 80s, "the keyboard in rock once more started to revert to the background, to be used for fills and atmosphere rather than for soloing". Some acts felt that using synthesizers to create sounds was "cheating"; Queen wrote in their album liner notes that they did not use them.


title: Synthesizer

text: The Minimoog took a place in mainstream black music, most notably in the work of Stevie Wonder, and in jazz, such as the work of Sun Ra. In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, the Minimoog was widely used in the emerging disco genre by artists including Abba and Giorgio Moroder. Sampling, introduced with the Fairlight synthesizer in 1979, has influenced all genres of music and had a major influence on the development of electronic and hip hop music.


title: Synthesizer

text: In the 1970s, electronic music composers such as Jean Michel Jarre and Isao Tomita released successful synthesizer-led instrumental albums. This influenced the emergence of synthpop, a subgenre of new wave, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The work of German krautrock bands such as Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, British acts such as John Foxx, Gary Numan and David Bowie, African-American acts such as George Clinton and Zapp, and Japanese electronic acts such as Yellow Magic Orchestra and Kitaro were influential in the development of the genre.


title: Synthesizer

text: The Roland TB-303 (1981), in conjunction with the Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines, became a foundation of electronic dance music genres such as house and techno when producers acquired cheap second-hand units later in the decade. The authors of "Analog Days" connect the synthesizer's origins in 1960s psychedelia to the raves and British "second summer of love" of the 1980s and the club scenes of the 1990s and 2000s.


title: Synthesizer

text: Gary Numan's 1979 hits "Are 'Friends' Electric?" and "Cars" made heavy use of synthesizers. OMD's "Enola Gay" (1980) used distinctive electronic percussion and a synthesized melody. Soft Cell used a synthesized melody on their 1981 hit "Tainted Love". Nick Rhodes, keyboardist of Duran Duran, used synthesizers including the Roland Jupiter-4 and Jupiter-8. Chart hits include Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough" (1981), the Human League's "Don't You Want Me" and works by Ultravox.


title: Synthesizer

text: In the 1980s, digital synthesizers were widely used in pop music. The Yamaha DX7, released in 1983, became a pop staple, used on songs by A-ha, Kenny Loggins, Kool & the Gang. Its "E PIANO 1" preset became particularly famous, especially for power ballads, and was used by artists including Whitney Houston, Chicago, Prince, Phil Collins, Luther Vandross, Billy Ocean, and Celine Dion. Korg M1 presets were widely used in 1990s house music, beginning with Madonna's 1990 single "Vogue".


title: Synthesizer

text: Synthesizers are common in film and television soundtracks. ARP synthesizers, for example, were used to create sound effects for the 1977 science fiction films "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Star Wars", including the "voice" of the robot R2-D2. In the 70s and 80s, synthesizers were used in the scores for thrillers and horror films including "A Clockwork Orange" (1971), "Apocalypse Now" (1979), "The Fog" (1980) and "Manhunter" (1986). Brad Fiedel used a Prophet synthesizer to record the soundtrack for "The Terminator" (1984), and the filmmaker John Carpenter used them extensively for his soundtracks. Synthesizers were used to create themes for television shows including "Knight Rider" (1982)", Twin Peaks" (1990) and "Stranger Things" (2016).


title: Synthesizer

text: The rise of the synthesizer led to major changes in music industry jobs, comparable to the earlier arrival of sound in film, which put live musicians accompanying silent films out of work. With its ability to imitate instruments such as strings and horns, the synthesizer threatened the jobs of session musicians. For a period, the Moog was banned from use in commercial work, a restriction negotiated by the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). Robert Moog felt that the AFM had not realized that his instrument had to be studied like any other, and instead imagined that "all the sounds that musicians could make somehow existed in the Moog — all you had to do was push a button that said 'Jascha Heifetz' and out would come the most fantastic violin player".


title: Synthesizer

text: Musician Walter Sear persuaded the AFM that the synthesizer demanded skill, and the category of "synthesizer player" was accepted into the union; however, players were still subject to "suspicion and hostility" for several years. In 1982, following a tour by Barry Manilow using synthesizers instead of an orchestra, the British Musicians' Union attempted to ban synthesizers, attracting controversy. That decade, a few musicians skilled at programming the popular Yamaha DX7 found employment creating sounds for other acts.


title: Synthesizer

text: Voltage-controlled amplifiers (VCAs) control the volume or gain of the audio signal. VCAs can be modulated by other components, such as LFOs and envelopes. A VCA is a preamp that boosts (amplifies) the electronic signal before passing it on to an external or built-in power amplifier, as well as a means to control its amplitude (volume) using an attenuator. The gain of the VCA is affected by a "control voltage" (CV), coming from an envelope generator, an LFO, the keyboard or some other source.


title: Synthesizer

text: Voltage-controlled filters (VCFs) "shape" the sound generated by the oscillators in the frequency domain, often under the control of an envelope or LFO. These are essential to subtractive synthesis. Filters are particularly important in subtractive synthesis, being designed to pass some frequency regions (or "bands") through unattenuated while significantly attenuating ("subtracting") others. The low-pass filter is most frequently used, but band-pass filters, band-reject filters and high-pass filters are also sometimes available.


title: Synthesizer

text: The filter may be controlled with a second ADSR envelope. An "envelope modulation" ("env mod") parameter on many synthesizers with filter envelopes determines how much the envelope affects the filter. If turned all the way down, the filter produces a flat sound with no envelope. When turned up the envelope becomes more noticeable, expanding the minimum and maximum range of the filter. The envelope applied on the filter helps the sound designer generating long notes or short notes by moving the parameters up and down such as decay, sustain and finally release. For instance by using a short decay with no sustain, the sound generated is commonly known as a "stab". Sound designers may prefer shaping the sound with filter instead of volume.


title: Synthesizer

text: Envelopes control how sounds change over time. They may control parameters such as amplitude (volume), filters (frequencies), or pitch. The most common envelope is the ADSR (attack, decay, sustain, release) envelope:


title: Synthesizer

text: Low-frequency oscillators (LFOs) produce waveforms used to modulate parameters, such as the pitch of oscillators (producing vibrato).


title: Synthesizer

text: Arpeggiators, included in many synthesizer models, take input chords and convert them into arpeggios. They usually include controls for speed, range and mode (the movement of the arpeggio).


title: Synthesizer

text: Synthesizers are often controlled with electronic or digital keyboards or MIDI controller keyboards, which may be built into the synthesizer unit or attached via connections such as CV/gate, USB, or MIDI. Keyboards may offer expression such as velocity sensitivity and aftertouch, allowing for more control over the sound. Other controllers include ribbon controllers, which track the movement of the finger across a touch-sensitive surface; wind controllers, played similarly to woodwind instruments; motion-sensitive controllers similar to video game motion controllers; electronic drum pads, played similarly to the heads of a drum kit; touchplates, which send signals depending on finger position and force; controllers designed for microtonal tunings; touchscreen devices such as tablets and smartphones; and fingerpads.


title: Synthesizer

text: Synthesizer clones are unlicensed recreations of previous synthesizers, often marketed as affordable versions of famous musical equipment. Clones are available as physical instruments and software. Companies that have sold software clones include Arturia and Native Instruments. Behringer manufactures equipment modelled on instruments including the Minimoog, Pro-One, and TB-303, and drum machines such as the TR-808. Other synthesizer clones include the MiniMOD (a series of Eurorack modules based on the Minimoog), the Intellijel Atlantis (based on the SH-101), and the x0x Heart (based on the TB-303).


title: Synthesizer

text: Creating clones of older hardware is legal where the patents have expired. In 1997, Mackie lost their lawsuit against Behringer as copyright law in the United States did not cover their circuit board designs.


title: Air quality index

text: An air quality index (AQI) is used by government agencies to communicate to the public how polluted the air currently is or how polluted it is forecast to become. AQI information is obtained by averaging readings from an air quality sensor, which can increase due to vehicle traffic, forest fires, or anything that can increase air pollution. Pollutants tested include ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, among others.


title: Air quality index

text: Public health risks increase as the AQI rises, especially affecting children, the elderly, and individuals with respiratory or cardiovascular issues. During these times, governmental bodies generally encourage people to reduce physical activity outdoors, or even avoid going out altogether. The use of face masks such as cloth masks may also be recommended.


title: Air quality index

text: Different countries have their own air quality indices, corresponding to different national air quality standards. Some of these are the Air Quality Health Index (Canada), the Air Pollution Index (Malaysia), and the Pollutant Standards Index (Singapore).


title: Air quality index

text: Computation of the AQI requires an air pollutant concentration over a specified averaging period, obtained from an air monitor or model. Taken together, concentration and time represent the dose of the air pollutant. Health effects corresponding to a given dose are established by epidemiological research. Air pollutants vary in potency, and the function used to convert from air pollutant concentration to AQI varies by pollutant. Its air quality index values are typically grouped into ranges. Each range is assigned a descriptor, a color code, and a standardized public health advisory.


title: Air quality index

text: The AQI can increase due to an increase of air emissions. For example, during rush hour traffic or when there is an upwind forest fire or from a lack of dilution of air pollutants. Stagnant air, often caused by an anticyclone, temperature inversion, or low wind speeds lets air pollution remain in a local area, leading to high concentrations of pollutants, chemical reactions between air contaminants and hazy conditions.


title: Air quality index

text: On a day when the AQI is predicted to be elevated due to fine particle pollution, an agency or public health organization might:


title: Air quality index

text: During a period of very poor air quality, such as an air pollution episode, when the AQI indicates that acute exposure may cause significant harm to the public health, agencies may invoke emergency plans that allow them to order major emitters (such as coal burning industries) to curtail emissions until the hazardous conditions abate.


title: Air quality index

text: Most air contaminants do not have an associated AQI. Many countries monitor ground-level ozone, particulates, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, and calculate air quality indices for these pollutants.


title: Air quality index

text: The definition of the AQI in a particular nation reflects the discourse surrounding the development of national air quality standards in that nation. A website allowing government agencies anywhere in the world to submit their real-time air monitoring data for display using a common definition of the air quality index has recently become available.


title: Air quality index

text: Each of the states and territories of Australia is responsible for monitoring air quality and publishing data in accordance with the National Environment Protection (Ambient Air Quality) Measure (NEPM) standards.


title: Air quality index

text: Each state and territory publishes air quality data for individual monitoring locations, and most states and territories publish air quality indexes for each monitoring location.


title: Air quality index

text: Across Australia, a consistent approach is taken with air quality indexes, using a simple linear scale where 100 represents the maximum concentration standard for each pollutant, as set by the NEPM. These maximum concentration standards are:


title: Air quality index

text: The air quality index (AQI) for an individual location is simply the highest of the air quality index values for each pollutant being monitored at that location.


title: Air quality index

text: Air quality in Canada has been reported for many years with provincial Air Quality Indices (AQIs). Significantly, AQI values reflect air quality management objectives, which are based on the lowest achievable emissions rate, rather than exclusive concern for human health. The Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) is a scale designed to help understand the impact of air quality on health. It is a health protection tool used to make decisions to reduce short-term exposure to air pollution by adjusting activity levels during increased levels of air pollution. The Air Quality Health Index also provides advice on how to improve air quality by proposing a behavioral change to reduce the environmental footprint. This index pays particular attention to people who are sensitive to air pollution. It provides them with advice on how to protect their health during air quality levels associated with low, moderate, high and very high health risks.


title: Air quality index

text: The AQHI provides a number from 1 to 10+ to indicate the level of health risk associated with local air quality. On occasion, when the amount of air pollution is abnormally high, the number may exceed 10. The AQHI provides a local air quality current value as well as a local air quality maximums forecast for today, tonight, and tomorrow, and provides associated health advice.


title: Air quality index

text: On December 30, 2013, Hong Kong replaced the Air Pollution Index with a new index called the "Air Quality Health Index". This index, reported by the Environmental Protection Department, is measured on a scale of 1 to 10+ and considers four air pollutants: ozone; nitrogen dioxide; sulphur dioxide and particulate matter (including PM10 and PM2.5). For any given hour the AQHI is calculated from the sum of the percentage excess risk of daily hospital admissions attributable to the 3-hour moving average concentrations of these four pollutants. The AQHIs are grouped into five AQHI health risk categories with health advice provided:


title: Air quality index

text: Each of the health risk categories has advice associated with it. At the "low" and "moderate" levels the public are advised that they can continue normal activities. For the "high" category, children, the elderly and people with heart or respiratory illnesses are advised to reduce outdoor physical exertion. Above this ("very high" or "serious"), the general public are likewise advised to reduce or avoid outdoor physical exertion.


title: Air quality index

text: China's Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) is responsible for measuring the level of air pollution in China. As of January 1, 2013, MEP monitors daily pollution level in 163 of its major cities. The AQI level is based on the level of six atmospheric pollutants, namely sulfur dioxide (SO), nitrogen dioxide (NO), suspended particulates smaller than 10 μm in aerodynamic diameter (PM), suspended particulates smaller than 2.5 μm in aerodynamic diameter (PM), carbon monoxide (CO), and ozone (O) measured at the monitoring stations throughout each city.


title: Air quality index

text: An individual score (Individual Air Quality Index, IAQI) is calculated using breakpoint concentrations below, and using same piecewise linear function to calculate intermediate values as the US AQI scale. and The final AQI value can be calculated either per hour or per 24 hours and is "the max" of these six scores.


title: Air quality index

text: The score for each pollutant is non-linear, as is the final AQI score. Thus an AQI of 300 does not mean twice the pollution of AQI at 150, nor does it mean the air is twice as harmful. The concentration of a pollutant when its IAQI is 100 does not equal twice its concentration when its IAQI is 50, nor does it mean the pollutant is twice as harmful. While an AQI of 50 from day 1 to 182 and AQI of 100 from day 183 to 365 does provide an annual average of 75, it does "not" mean the pollution is acceptable even if the benchmark of 100 is deemed safe. Because the benchmark is a 24-hour target, and the annual average must match the annual target, it is entirely possible to have safe air every day of the year but still fail the annual pollution benchmark.


title: Air quality index

text: The "Common Air Quality Index" (CAQI) is an air quality index used in Europe since 2006. In November 2017, the European Environment Agency announced the "European Air Quality Index" (EAQI) and started encouraging its use on websites and for other ways of informing the public about air quality.


title: Air quality index

text: , the EU-supported project "CiteairII" argued that the CAQI had been evaluated on a "large set" of data, and described the CAQI's motivation and definition. "CiteairII" stated that having an air quality index that would be easy to present to the general public was a major motivation, leaving aside the more complex question of a health-based index, which would require, for example, effects of combined levels of different pollutants. The main aim of the CAQI was to have an index that would encourage wide comparison across the EU, without replacing local indices. "CiteairII" stated that the "main goal of the CAQI is not to warn people for possible adverse health effects of poor air quality but to attract their attention to urban air pollution and its main source (traffic) and help them decrease their exposure."


title: Air quality index

text: The CAQI is a number on a scale from 1 to 100, where a low value means good air quality and a high value means bad air quality. The index is defined in both hourly and daily versions, and separately near roads (a "roadside" or "traffic" index) or away from roads (a "background" index). , the CAQI had two mandatory components for the roadside index, NO and PM, and three mandatory components for the background index, NO, PM and O. It also included optional pollutants PM, CO and SO. A "sub-index" is calculated for each of the mandatory (and optional if available) components. The CAQI is defined as the sub-index that represents the worst quality among those components.


title: Air quality index

text: Some of the key pollutant concentrations in μg/m for the hourly background index, the corresponding sub-indices, and five CAQI ranges and verbal descriptions are as follows.


title: Air quality index

text: Frequently updated CAQI values and maps are shown on www.airqualitynow.eu and other websites. A separate "Year Average Common Air Quality Index" (YACAQI) is also defined, in which different pollutant sub-indices are separately normalised to a value typically near unity. For example, the yearly averages of NO, PM and PM are divided by 40 μg/m, 40 μg/m and 20 μg/m, respectively. The overall background or traffic YACAQI for a city is the arithmetic mean of a defined subset of these sub-indices.


title: Air quality index

text: The National Air Quality Index (AQI) was launched in New Delhi on September 17, 2014, under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.


title: Air quality index

text: The Central Pollution Control Board along with State Pollution Control Boards has been operating National Air Monitoring Program (NAMP) covering 240 cities of the country having more than 342 monitoring stations. An Expert Group comprising medical professionals, air quality experts, academia, advocacy groups, and SPCBs was constituted and a technical study was awarded to IIT Kanpur. IIT Kanpur and the Expert Group recommended an AQI scheme in 2014. While the earlier measuring index was limited to three indicators, the new index measures eight parameters. The continuous monitoring systems that provide data on near real-time basis are installed in New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata and Ahmedabad.


title: Air quality index

text: There are six AQI categories, namely Good, Satisfactory, Moderate, Poor, Severe, and Hazardous. The proposed AQI will consider eight pollutants (PM, PM, NO, SO, CO, O, NH, and Pb) for which short-term (up to 24-hourly averaging period) National Ambient Air Quality Standards are prescribed. Based on the measured ambient concentrations, corresponding standards and likely health impact, a sub-index is calculated for each of these pollutants. The worst sub-index reflects overall AQI. Likely health impacts for different AQI categories and pollutants have also been suggested, with primary inputs from the medical experts in the group. The AQI values and corresponding ambient concentrations (health breakpoints) as well as associated likely health impacts for the identified eight pollutants are as follows:


title: Air quality index

text: According to Japan Weather Association, Japan uses a different scale to measure the air quality index.


title: Air quality index

text: The air quality in Mexico City is reported in IMECAs. The IMECA is calculated using the measurements of average times of the chemicals ozone (O), sulphur dioxide (SO), nitrogen dioxide (NO), carbon monoxide (CO), particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM), and particles smaller than 10 micrometers (PM).


title: Air quality index

text: Singapore uses the Pollutant Standards Index to report on its air quality, with details of the calculation similar but not identical to those used in Malaysia and Hong Kong.


title: Air quality index

text: The PSI chart below is grouped by index values and descriptors, according to the National Environment Agency.


title: Air quality index

text: The Ministry of Environment of South Korea uses the Comprehensive Air-quality Index (CAI) to describe the ambient air quality based on the health risks of air pollution. The index aims to help the public easily understand the air quality and protect people's health. The CAI is on a scale from 0 to 500, which is divided into six categories. The higher the CAI value, the greater the level of air pollution.


title: Air quality index

text: Of values of the five air pollutants, the highest is the CAI value. The index also has associated health effects and a colour representation of the categories as shown below.


title: Air quality index

text: The N Seoul Tower on Namsan Mountain in central Seoul, South Korea, is illuminated in blue, from sunset to 23:00 and 22:00 in winter, on days where the air quality in Seoul is 45 or less. During the spring of 2012, the Tower was lit up for 52 days, which is four days more than in 2011.


title: Air quality index

text: The most commonly used air quality index in the UK is the "Daily Air Quality Index" recommended by the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP). This index has ten points, which are further grouped into four bands: low, moderate, high and very high. Each of the bands comes with advice for at-risk groups and the general population.


title: Air quality index

text: The index is based on the concentrations of five pollutants. The index is calculated from the concentrations of the following pollutants: Ozone, Nitrogen Dioxide, Sulphur Dioxide, PM2.5 (particles with an aerodynamic diameter less than 2.5 μm) and PM10. The breakpoints between index values are defined for each pollutant separately and the overall index is defined as the maximum value of the index. Different averaging periods are used for different pollutants.


title: Air quality index

text: The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed an Air Quality Index that is used to report air quality. This AQI is divided into six categories indicating increasing levels of health concern. An AQI value over 300 represents hazardous air quality and below 50 the air quality is good.


title: Air quality index

text: The AQI is based on the five "criteria" pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act: ground-level ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. The EPA has established National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for each of these pollutants in order to protect public health. An AQI value of 100 generally corresponds to the level of the NAAQS for the pollutant. The Clean Air Act (USA) (1990) requires the EPA to review its National Ambient Air Quality Standards every five years to reflect evolving health effects information. The Air Quality Index is adjusted periodically to reflect these changes.


title: Air quality index

text: The air quality index is a piecewise linear function of the pollutant concentration. At the boundary between AQI categories, there is a discontinuous jump of one AQI unit. To convert from concentration to AQI this equation is used:


title: Air quality index

text: Suppose a monitor records a 24-hour average fine particle (PM) concentration of 26.4 micrograms per cubic meter. The equation above results in an AQI of:


title: Air quality index

text: which rounds to index value of 81, corresponding to air quality in the "Moderate" range. To convert an air pollutant concentration to an AQI, EPA has developed a calculator.


title: Air quality index

text: If multiple pollutants are measured at a monitoring site, then the largest or "dominant" AQI value is reported for the location. The ozone AQI between 100 and 300 is computed by selecting the larger of the AQI calculated with a 1-hour ozone value and the AQI computed with the 8-hour ozone value.


title: Air quality index

text: Eight-hour ozone averages do not define AQI values greater than 300; AQI values of 301 or greater are calculated with 1-hour ozone concentrations. 1-hour SO values do not define higher AQI values greater than 200. AQI values of 201 or greater are calculated with 24-hour SO concentrations.


title: Air quality index

text: Real-time monitoring data from continuous monitors are typically available as 1-hour averages. However, computation of the AQI for some pollutants requires averaging over multiple hours of data. (For example, calculation of the ozone AQI requires computation of an 8-hour average and computation of the PM or PM AQI requires a 24-hour average.) To accurately reflect the current air quality, the multi-hour average used for the AQI computation should be centered on the current time, but as concentrations of future hours are unknown and are difficult to estimate accurately, EPA uses surrogate concentrations to estimate these multi-hour averages. For reporting the PM, PM and ozone air quality indices, this surrogate concentration is called the NowCast. The Nowcast is a particular type of weighted average that provides more weight to the most recent air quality data when air pollution levels are changing. There is a free email subscription service for New York inhabitants – AirNYC. Subscribers get notifications about the changes in the AQI values for the selected location (e.g. home address), based on air quality conditions.


title: Air quality index

text: Real time monitoring data and forecasts of air quality that are color-coded in terms of the air quality index are available from EPA's AirNow web site. Other organizations provide monitoring for members of sensitive groups such as asthmatics, children and adults over the age of 65. Historical air monitoring data including AQI charts and maps are available at EPA's AirData website. Detailed map about current AQI level and its two-day forecast is available from Aerostate web site.


title: Air quality index

text: The AQI made its debut in 1968, when the National Air Pollution Control Administration undertook an initiative to develop an air quality index and to apply the methodology to Metropolitan Statistical Areas. The impetus was to draw public attention to the issue of air pollution and indirectly push responsible local public officials to take action to control sources of pollution and enhance air quality within their jurisdictions.


title: Air quality index

text: Jack Fensterstock, the head of the National Inventory of Air Pollution Emissions and Control Branch, was tasked to lead the development of the methodology and to compile the air quality and emissions data necessary to test and calibrate resultant indices.


title: Air quality index

text: The initial iteration of the air quality index used standardized ambient pollutant concentrations to yield individual pollutant indices. These indices were then weighted and summed to form a single total air quality index. The overall methodology could use concentrations that are taken from ambient monitoring data or are predicted by means of a diffusion model. The concentrations were then converted into a standard statistical distribution with a preset mean and standard deviation. The resultant individual pollutant indices are assumed to be equally weighted, although values other than unity can be used. Likewise, the index can incorporate any number of pollutants although it was only used to combine SO, CO, and TSP because of a lack of available data for other pollutants.


title: Air quality index

text: While the methodology was designed to be robust, the practical application for all metropolitan areas proved to be inconsistent due to the paucity of ambient air quality monitoring data, lack of agreement on weighting factors, and non-uniformity of air quality standards across geographical and political boundaries. Despite these issues, the publication of lists ranking metropolitan areas achieved the public policy objectives and led to the future development of improved indices and their routine application.


title: Air quality index

text: On November 12, 2019, Vietnam Environment Administration issued Decision No. 1459/QD-TCMT on promulgating Technical Guidelines for calculation and publication of Vietnam Air Quality Index (VN_AQI).


title: Air quality index

text: Some of the following websites display actively updated air quality index maps; others are archived versions of inactive websites:


title: NBA Rookie of the Year Award

text: The National Basketball Association's Rookie of the Year Award is an annual National Basketball Association (NBA) award given to the top rookie(s) of the regular season. Initiated following the 1952–53 NBA season, it confers the Eddie Gottlieb Trophy, named after the former Philadelphia Warriors head coach. Starting with the 2022–23 NBA season, winners receive the Wilt Chamberlain Trophy, named after the former Rookie of the Year winner.


title: NBA Rookie of the Year Award

text: The winner is selected by a panel of United States and Canadian sportswriters and broadcasters, each casting first-, second-, and third-place votes (worth five points, three points, and one point, respectively). The player(s) with the highest point total, regardless of the number of first-place votes, wins the award.


title: NBA Rookie of the Year Award

text: The most recent Rookie of the Year winner is Scottie Barnes of the Toronto Raptors. Twenty-one winners were drafted first overall. Sixteen winners have also won the NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) award in their careers with Wilt Chamberlain and Wes Unseld earning both honors the same season. Thirty of the non-active winners have been elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Three seasons had joint winners—Dave Cowens and Geoff Petrie in the , Grant Hill and Jason Kidd in the , and Elton Brand and Steve Francis in the 1999–2000 season. Five players won the award unanimously (by capturing all of the first-place votes)—Ralph Sampson, David Robinson, Blake Griffin, Damian Lillard, and Karl-Anthony Towns.


title: NBA Rookie of the Year Award

text: Patrick Ewing of Jamaica, Pau Gasol of Spain, Kyrie Irving and Ben Simmons of Australia, Andrew Wiggins of Canada, and Luka Dončić of Slovenia are the only winners not born in the United States. Three of these individuals have dual nationality by birth—Wiggins and Simmons have American fathers, and both of Irving's parents are Americans. Ewing immigrated to the Boston area at age 11, Irving moved to the United States at age 2, and Wiggins and Simmons moved to the U.S. while in high school. Gasol and Dončić are the only winners trained entirely outside the United States.


title: NBA Rookie of the Year Award

text: Chamberlain (Harlem Globetrotters), Gasol (FC Barcelona of Liga ACB and EuroLeague), Dončić (Real Madrid of Liga ACB and EuroLeague), and Ball (BC Prienai of the Lithuanian Basketball League, the Los Angeles Ballers of the JBA, and the Illawarra Hawks of the NBL) all had professional careers outside the NBA prior to being drafted. Ball also had previously won the NBL Rookie of the Year Award.


title: NBA Rookie of the Year Award

text: Prior to the season, the Rookie of the Year was selected by newspaper writers; however, the NBA does not officially recognize those players as winners. The league did publish the pre-1953 winners in their 1994–95 edition of the "Official NBA Guide" and the 1994 "Official NBA Basketball Encyclopedia", but those winners have not been listed in subsequent publications.


title: Con O'Neill (actor)

text: Robert "Con" O'Neill (born 15 August 1966) is an English actor. He started his acting career at the Everyman Theatre and became primarily known for his performances in musicals. He received critical acclaim and won a Laurence Olivier Award for playing Michael "Mickey" Johnstone in the musical "Blood Brothers". Subsequently, he was nominated for a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for the same role. He has also appeared in many films and television series.


title: Con O'Neill (actor)

text: O'Neill trained at the Elliott-Clarke College in Liverpool and began his acting career at Liverpool's Everyman Youth Theatre.


title: Con O'Neill (actor)

text: He was awarded the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical in 1988 for his performance in Willy Russell's "Blood Brothers", and was nominated for Broadway's 1993 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for "Blood Brothers".


title: Con O'Neill (actor)

text: In the 1980s, he had a walk-on role in "One Summer" as Jackson. He starred in "Dancin' Thru the Dark", the 1990 film adaptation of Willy Russell's "Stags and Hens". In 1992, he played Cougar Glass in the world premiere of Philip Ridley's "The Fastest Clock in the Universe". He appeared in "Moving Story" (1994), a TV comedy drama, as Nick, part of a removals team. He appeared as wheelchair user P.C. Ian LeFebre in "The Mild Bunch", the second season's eighth episode of "Pie in the Sky" (1995). He had a supporting role in "Cider with Rosie" (1998). In 2003, he portrayed Mickey in "The Illustrated Mum". In 2006, he starred as Aston in a tour of Sheffield theatres' production of Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker". In 1999, he starred in "The Last Seduction II".


title: Con O'Neill (actor)

text: In 2008, he appeared in "Criminal Justice" a five-part TV drama on the BBC, playing the part of Ralph Stone, a solicitor. He played the part of Joe Meek in both the 2008 film and 2005 play of "". In 2011, he took the role of dock worker Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge" at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester (from 18 May to 25 June 2011). This portrayal won the 2011 Manchester Theatre Award for Best Actor. In 2012, he played Dr. Bob Massey in "Fearful Symmetry", S6:E3 of "Lewis".


title: Con O'Neill (actor)

text: He played St. Paul in the 2013 mini-series "The Bible". The same year he also appeared in "Life of Crime" as DCI Ferguson and in "Midsomer Murders" "Schooled in Murder" as Jim Caxton. He portrays Val Pearson in the sitcom "Uncle" (2014 to 2017). He played Cliff in "Cucumber", an eight-part TV drama series. In 2015, he starred in the 35th-anniversary staging of Willy Russell's "Educating Rita" at The Liverpool Playhouse. He appears as Neil Ackroyd in the second series of "Happy Valley". In 2016, O'Neill played the part of Joe Brierley in the second series of "Ordinary Lies" and appeared in two episodes of the "Doctor Who" spin-off "Class". In the 2019 HBO miniseries "Chernobyl" he portrayed the plant director Viktor Bryukhanov.


title: Glory hole

text: A glory hole (also spelled gloryhole and glory-hole) is a hole in a wall or partition, often between public lavatory cubicles or sex video arcade booths and lounges, for people to engage in sexual activity or observe the person in the next cubicle while one or both parties masturbate, tea-bag or fellate.


title: Glory hole

text: Glory holes are especially associated with gay male culture, and anal or oral sex, and come from a history of persecution. The partition maintains anonymity and a sense of reassurance that the people involved would not be identified and possibly arrested. However, they are not exclusively favoured by gay people, and have become more commonly acknowledged as a fetish for straight and bisexual couples.


title: Glory hole

text: In more recent years, public glory holes have faded in popularity in many countries, though some gay websites offer directories of the remaining glory holes.


title: Glory hole

text: Glory holes are sometimes the topic of erotic literature, and pornographic films have been devoted to the uses of glory holes.


title: Glory hole

text: Numerous motivations can be ascribed to the use and eroticism of glory holes. As a wall separates the two participants, they have no contact except for a mouth, a penis, and perhaps a hand. Almost total anonymity is maintained, as no other attributes are taken into consideration. The glory hole is seen as an erotic oasis in gay subcultures around the world; people's motives, experiences and attributions of value in its use are varied.


title: Glory hole

text: In light of the ongoing HIV pandemic, many gay men re-evaluated their sexual and erotic desires and practices. It is suggested by queer theorist Tim Dean that glory holes allow for a physical barrier, which may be an extension of psychological barriers, in which there is internalized homophobia (a result of many societies' reluctance towards discussing LGBT practices and people). For some gay men, a glory hole serves to depersonalize their partner altogether as a disembodied object of sexual desire, either sticking through or on the other side of the hole.


title: Glory hole

text: The first documented instance of a glory hole was in a 1707 court case known as the "Tryals of Thomas Vaughan and Thomas Davis" in London, England, which involved the extortion of a man known in the documents only as Mr Guillam. At the time, gay sex in public places could lead to arrests by members of the Society for the Reformation of Manners. Often the authorities would wait outside the Lincoln's Inn bog house in London as one place to catch people.


title: Glory hole

text: The courts heard that a man (Mr. Guillam) has visited a washroom stall to relieve himself, when another male put his penis through a hole in the wall ("a Boy in the adjoyning Vault put his Privy-member through a Hole"). Mr. Guillam, surprised by the action, fled the washroom, only to be followed by the male who cried out that he would have had sex with him. Mr. Guillam was then confronted by Mr. Vaughan who, knowing Mr. Guillam's innocence, threatened to turn him in to the police, and reveal him to his wife, if he did not pay a sum of money.


title: Glory hole

text: During the mid-1900s, police often used bathroom glory holes as an entrapment method for gay men, often recording the incidents as evidence to prosecute. Such incidents were recorded in California and Ohio in the 1950s and 1960s, with archival police footage of "tearooms" appearing on pornography websites, such as Pornhub.


title: Glory hole

text: According to the "Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang", the first time glory hole appears in print was in 1949, when an anonymously published glossary called "Swasarnt Nerf's Gay Girl's Guide" refers to a "Phallic size hole in partition between toilet booths. Sometimes used also for a mere peep-hole."


title: Glory hole

text: Another reference to glory holes appeared in "Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places", a controversial book published by sociologist Laud Humphreys in 1970, in which he suggests the "tearoom," or bathroom stall, as a prime space for men to congregate for sexual fulfilment. It would also later appear in the 1977 book "The Joy of Gay Sex".


title: Glory hole

text: Public glory holes started to fade in popularity as the decriminalization of homosexuality was introduced in many countries, and concerns over HIV/AIDS changed gay culture. A 2001 study in the "Journal of Homosexuality" found that public glory holes remained popular among many gay men, "simply because they find the places exciting and/or convenient."


title: Glory hole

text: Despite the fading prominence of glory holes in public, some gay bath houses and sex clubs maintain the presence of glory holes in their establishment, and some people have acknowledged installing private glory hole walls inside their own homes. Bathroom sex remains a fetish for a subset of gay men, who will engage in similar anonymous acts below a bathroom stall separator, rather than through a hole.


title: Glory hole

text: In 2018, the Western Australian Museum added a "historic glory hole" to its collection. The hole had been situated in the toilet stall of the Albany Highway-side of the Gosnells train station, but was removed and saved in 1997 before the toilet was demolished.


title: Glory hole

text: A 2020 BuzzFeed article collected anecdotes from gay, straight, and bisexual readers recounting their experiences at swinger parties with glory holes present.


title: Glory hole

text: Public sex of any kind is illegal in many parts of the world, and police undercover operations continue to be used in order to enforce such laws. Adverse personal consequences to participants in glory hole activity have included police surveillance, public humiliation in the press, often with marital and employment consequences, and imprisonment following a criminal conviction. Gay bashing, mugging, and bodily injury are further potential risks. For reasons of personal safety, as well as etiquette, men typically wait for a signal from the receptive partner to come through the hole before inserting any part of their genitals through a glory hole.


title: Glory hole

text: In June 2020, a New York Health Department COVID-19 advisory suggested sex through "physical barriers, like walls," but did not specifically reference glory holes, as part of broader measures on dating and sex during the pandemic.


title: Glory hole

text: About a month later, the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control went a step further with its COVID-19 precautionary recommendations by suggesting using "barriers, like walls (e.g., glory holes), that allow for sexual contact but prevent close face-to-face contact" as one way to lower the risk of exposure to the virus.


title: Glory hole

text: In pornography, glory holes are a recurring theme, particularly in gay videos, though not exclusively. Straight porn often features scenarios involving the partition; in some instances, it will involve kink mistresses, who see it as a form of women's sexual agency and mastery.


title: Glory hole

text: The early 20th century pornographic cartoon Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure depicts the use of an improvised glory hole for zoophilic purposes.


title: Glory hole

text: "Jackass Number Two" features a stunt where one of the cast members dresses his penis in a mouse costume and inserts it into a glory hole that feeds into a snake's cage.


title: Apple A15

text: The Apple A15 Bionic is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc. It is used in the iPhone 13 and 13 Mini, iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max, iPad Mini (6th generation), iPhone SE (3rd generation), iPhone 14 and 14 Plus and Apple TV 4K (3rd generation).


title: Apple A15

text: The Apple A15 Bionic features an Apple-designed 64-bit six-core CPU implementing ARMv8 with two high-performance cores called Avalanche running at 3.24 GHz and four energy-efficient cores called Blizzard running at 2.01 GHz. Apple claims the A15 in the iPhones is 50% faster than the competition. Apple claims the A15 in the iPad Mini 6 is 40% faster than the A12. An in-depth breakdown by Anandtech revealed that "compared to the A14, the new A15 increases the peak single-core frequency of the two-performance core cluster by 8%, now reaching up to 3240MHz compared to the 2998MHz of the previous generation. When both performance cores are active, their operating frequency goes up by 10%, both now running at 3180MHz compared to the previous generation’s 2890MHz".


title: Apple A15

text: The A15 contains 15 billion transistors, a 27.1% increase from the A14's transistor count of 11.8 billion. It includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a new 16-core Neural Engine. The Neural Engine can perform 15.8 trillion operations per second, faster than A14's 11 trillion operations per second (+ 43%). The A15 also includes a new image processor (ISP) with improved computational photography capabilities. Apple also boosted performance by doubling the system cache to 32MB.


title: Apple A15

text: The A15 has video codec encoding support for HEVC and H.264. It has decoding support for HEVC, H.264, MPEG‑4 Part 2, and Motion JPEG.


title: Apple A15

text: The A15 integrates an Apple-designed five-core GPU for the iPad mini (6th generation), iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max, and iPhone 14 and 14 Plus. One GPU core is disabled in the iPhone SE (3rd generation), and iPhone 13 and 13 Mini, resulting in a four-core GPU for these models.


title: Ghost town

text: A ghost town (deserted city or abandoned city) is an abandoned village, town, or city, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it (usually industrial or agricultural) has failed or ended for any reason (e.g. a host ore deposit exhausted by metal mining). The town may also have declined because of natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, prolonged droughts, extreme heat or extreme cold, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, pollution, or nuclear disasters. The term can sometimes refer to cities, towns, and neighbourhoods that, though still populated, are significantly less so than in past years; for example, those affected by high levels of unemployment and dereliction.


title: Ghost town

text: Some ghost towns, especially those that preserve period-specific architecture, have become tourist attractions. Some examples are Bannack, Montana, in the United States, Barkerville, British Columbia, in Canada, Craco in Italy, Aghdam in Azerbaijan, Kolmanskop in Namibia, Pripyat in Ukraine, Dhanushkodi in India and Fordlândia in Brazil.


title: Ghost town

text: The town of Plymouth on the Caribbean island of Montserrat is a ghost town that is the "de jure" capital of Montserrat. It was rendered uninhabitable by volcanic ash from an eruption of the Soufrière Hills Volcano in 1995 and has remained so.


title: Ghost town

text: The definition of a ghost town varies between individuals, and between cultures. Some writers discount settlements that were abandoned as a result of a natural or human-made disaster or other causes using the term only to describe settlements that were deserted because they were no longer economically viable; T. Lindsey Baker, author of "Ghost Towns of Texas", defines a ghost town as "a town for which the reason for being no longer exists". Some believe that any settlement with visible tangible remains should not be called a ghost town; others say, conversely, that a ghost town should contain the tangible remains of buildings. Whether or not the settlement must be completely deserted, or may contain a small population, is also a matter for debate. Generally, though, the term is used in a looser sense, encompassing any and all of these definitions. American author Lambert Florin's defined a ghost town as "a shadowy semblance of a former self".


title: Ghost town

text: Factors leading to the abandonment of towns include depleted natural resources, economic activity shifting elsewhere, railroads and roads bypassing or no longer accessing the town, human intervention, disasters, massacres, wars, and the shifting of politics or fall of empires. A town can also be abandoned when it is part of an exclusion zone due to natural or man-made causes.


title: Ghost town

text: Ghost towns may result when the single activity or resource that created a boomtown (e.g., nearby mine, mill or resort) is depleted or the resource economy undergoes a "bust" (e.g., catastrophic resource price collapse). Boomtowns can often decrease in size as fast as they initially grew. Sometimes, all or nearly the entire population can desert the town, resulting in a ghost town.


title: Ghost town

text: The dismantling of a boomtown can often occur on a planned basis. Mining companies nowadays will create a temporary community to service a mine site, building all the accommodations, shops and services required, and then remove them once the resource has been extracted. Modular buildings can be used to facilitate the process. A gold rush would often bring intensive but short-lived economic activity to a remote village, only to leave a ghost town once the resource was depleted.


title: Ghost town

text: In some cases, multiple factors may remove the economic basis for a community; some former mining towns on U.S. Route 66 suffered both mine closures when the resources were depleted and loss of highway traffic as US 66 was diverted from places like Oatman, Arizona, onto a more direct path. Mine and pulp mill closures have led to many ghost towns in British Columbia, Canada, including several relatively recent ones: Ocean Falls, which closed in 1973 after the pulp mill was decommissioned; Kitsault, whose molybdenum mine shut down after only 18 months in 1982; and Cassiar, whose asbestos mine operated from 1952 to 1992.


title: Ghost town

text: In other cases, the reason for abandonment can arise from a town's intended economic function shifting to another, nearby place. This happened to Collingwood, Queensland, in Outback Australia when nearby Winton outperformed Collingwood as a regional centre for the livestock-raising industry. The railway reached Winton in 1899, linking it with the rest of Queensland, and Collingwood was a ghost town by the following year. More broadly across Australia, there has been a shift towards fly-in fly-out arrangements over building a company town, in order to avoid the development of ghost towns once a mining resource has been fully extracted.


title: Ghost town

text: The Middle East has many ghost towns that were created when the shifting of politics or the fall of empires caused capital cities to be socially or economically unviable, such as Ctesiphon.


title: Ghost town

text: The rise of real-estate speculation and the resulting possibility of real-estate bubbles (sometimes due to outright overbuilding by land developers) may also trigger the appearance of certain elements of a ghost town, as real-estate prices initially rise (whereupon affordable housing becomes less available) and then later fall for a variety of reasons that are often tied to economic cycles and/or marketing hubris. This has been observed to occur in various countries, including Spain, China, the United States, and Canada, where housing is often used as an investment rather than for habitation.


title: Ghost town

text: Railroads and roads bypassing or no longer reaching a town can also create a ghost town. This was the case in many of the ghost towns along Ontario's historic Opeongo Line, and along U.S. Route 66 after motorists bypassed the latter on the faster moving highways I-44 and I-40. Some ghost towns were founded along railways where steam trains would stop at periodic intervals to take on water. Amboy, California, was part of one such series of villages along the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad across the Mojave Desert.


title: Ghost town

text: Ghost towns may be created when land is expropriated by a government, and residents are required to relocate. One example is the village of Tyneham in Dorset, England, acquired during World War II to build an artillery range.


title: Ghost town

text: A similar situation occurred in the U.S. when NASA acquired land to construct the John C. Stennis Space Center (SSC), a rocket testing facility in Hancock County, Mississippi (on the Mississippi side of the Pearl River, which is the Mississippi–Louisiana state line). This required NASA to acquire a large (approximately ) buffer zone because of the loud noise and potential dangers associated with testing such rockets. Five thinly populated rural Mississippi communities (Gainesville, Logtown, Napoleon, Santa Rosa, and Westonia), plus the northern portion of a sixth (Pearlington), along with 700 families in residence, had to be completely relocated away from the facility.


title: Ghost town

text: Sometimes the town might cease to officially exist, but the physical infrastructure remains. For example, the five Mississippi communities that had to be abandoned to build SSC still have remnants of those communities within the facility itself. These include city streets, now overgrown with forest flora and fauna, and a one-room schoolhouse. Another example of infrastructure remaining is the former town of Weston, Illinois, that voted itself out of existence and turned the land over for construction of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Many houses and even a few barns remain, used for housing visiting scientists and storing maintenance equipment, while roads that used to cross through the site have been blocked off at the edges of the property, with gatehouses or barricades to prevent unsupervised access.


title: Ghost town

text: Some towns become deserted when their populations were massacred. The original French village at Oradour-sur-Glane was destroyed on 10 June 1944 when 642 of its 663 inhabitants were killed by a German Waffen-SS company. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site, and the ruins of the original have been maintained as a memorial.


title: Ghost town

text: Another example is Aghdam, a city in Azerbaijan. Armenian forces occupied Aghdam in July 1993 during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. The heavy fighting forced the entire population to flee. Upon seizing the city, Armenian forces destroyed much of the town to discourage Azerbaijanis from returning. More damage occurred in the following decades when locals looted the abandoned town for building materials. It is currently almost entirely ruined and uninhabited.


title: Ghost town

text: Natural and man-made disasters can create ghost towns. For example, after being flooded more than 30 times since their town was founded in 1845, residents of Pattonsburg, Missouri, decided to relocate after two floods in 1993. With government help, the whole town was rebuilt away.


title: Ghost town

text: Craco, a medieval village in the Italian region of Basilicata, was evacuated after a landslide in 1963. Nowadays it is a filming location for many movies, including "The Passion of The Christ" by Mel Gibson, "Christ Stopped at Eboli" by Francesco Rosi, "The Nativity Story" by Catherine Hardwicke and "Quantum of Solace" by Marc Forster.


title: Ghost town

text: In 1984, Centralia, Pennsylvania, was abandoned due to an uncontainable mine fire, which began in 1962 and still rages to this day; eventually the fire reached an abandoned mine underneath the nearby town of Byrnesville, Pennsylvania, which caused that mine to catch on fire too and forced the evacuation of that town as well.


title: Ghost town

text: Ghost towns may also occasionally come into being due to an "anticipated" natural disaster – for example, the Canadian town of Lemieux, Ontario, was abandoned in 1991 after soil testing revealed that the community was built on an unstable bed of Leda clay. Two years after the last building in Lemieux was demolished, a landslide swept part of the former town-site into the South Nation River. Two decades earlier, the Canadian town of Saint-Jean-Vianney, Québec, also constructed on a Leda clay base, had been abandoned after a landslide on 4 May 1971, which swept away 41 homes, killing 31 people.


title: Ghost town

text: Following the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, dangerously high levels of nuclear contamination escaped into the surrounding area, and nearly 200 towns and villages in Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus were evacuated, including the cities of Pripyat and Chernobyl. The area was so contaminated that many of the evacuees were never permitted to return to their homes. Pripyat is the most famous of these abandoned towns; it was built for the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and had a population of almost 50,000 at the time of the disaster.


title: Ghost town

text: Significant fatality rates from epidemics have produced ghost towns. Some places in eastern Arkansas were abandoned after more than 7,000 Arkansans died during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 and 1919. Several communities in Ireland, particularly in the west of the country, were wiped out due to the Great Famine in the latter half of the 19th century, and the years of economic decline that followed.


title: Ghost town

text: Catastrophic environmental damage caused by long-term contamination can also create a ghost town. Some notable examples are Times Beach, Missouri, whose residents were exposed to a high level of dioxins, and Wittenoom, Western Australia, which was once Australia's largest source of blue asbestos, but was shut down in 1966 due to health concerns. Treece and Picher, twin communities straddling the Kansas–Oklahoma border, were once one of the United States' largest sources of zinc and lead, but over a century of unregulated disposal of mine tailings led to groundwater contamination and lead poisoning in the town's children, eventually resulting in a mandatory Environmental Protection Agency buyout and evacuation. Contamination due to ammunition caused by military use may also lead to the development of ghost towns. Tyneham, in Dorset, was requisitioned for military exercises during the Second World War, and remains unpopulated, being littered with unexploded munitions from regular shelling.


title: Ghost town

text: For example, Walhalla, Victoria, Australia, became almost deserted after its gold mine ceased operation in 1914, but owing to its accessibility and proximity to other attractive locations, it has had a recent economic and holiday population surge. Another town, Sungai Lembing, Malaysia, was almost deserted due to closure of a tin mine in 1986 was revived in 2001 and has become a tourist destination since then.


title: Ghost town

text: Foncebadón, a village in León, Spain, that was mostly abandoned and only inhabited by a mother and son, is slowly being revived owing to the ever-increasing stream of pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela.


title: Ghost town

text: Some ghost towns (e.g. Riace, Muñotello) are being repopulated by respectively refugees and homeless people. In Riace, this was accomplished by a scheme funded by the Italian government which offers the housing to refugees and in Muñotello it was accomplished through an NGO (Madrina Foundation).


title: Ghost town

text: In Algeria, many cities became hamlets after the end of Late Antiquity. They were revived with shifts in population during and after French colonization of Algeria. Oran, currently the nation's second-largest city with 1 million people, was a village of only a few thousand people before colonization.


title: Ghost town

text: Alexandria, the third-largest city of Egypt, was a flourishing city in the Ancient era, but declined during the Middle Ages. It underwent a dramatic revival during the 19th century; from a population of 5,000 in 1806, it grew into a city of more than 200,000 inhabitants by 1882, and is now home to more than four million people.


title: Ghost town

text: Wars and rebellions in some African countries have left many towns and villages deserted. Since 2003, when President François Bozizé came to power, thousands of citizens of the Central African Republic have been forced to flee their homes as a result of the escalating conflict between armed rebels and government troops. Villages accused of supporting the rebels, such as Beogombo Deux near Paoua, are ransacked by government soldiers. Those who are not killed have no choice but to escape to refugee camps. The instability in the region also leaves organized and well-equipped bandits free to terrorize the populace, often leaving villages abandoned in their wake. Elsewhere in Africa, the town of Lukangol was burnt to the ground during tribal clashes in South Sudan. Before its destruction, the town had a population of 20,000. The Libyan town of Tawergha had a population of around 25,000 before it was abandoned during the 2011 civil war, and it has remained empty since.


title: Ghost town

text: Many of the ghost towns in mineral-rich Africa are former mining towns. Shortly after the start of the 1908 diamond rush in German South-West Africa, now known as Namibia, the German Imperial government claimed sole mining rights by creating the "Sperrgebiet" ("forbidden zone"), effectively criminalizing new settlement. The small mining towns of this area, among them Pomona, Elizabeth Bay and Kolmanskop, were exempt from this ban, but the denial of new land claims soon rendered all of them ghost towns.


title: Ghost town

text: China has many large urban property developments, sometimes referred to as "ghost cities", that have remained mostly unoccupied since they were built. The town of Dhanushkodi, India is a ghost town. It was destroyed during the 1964 Rameswaram cyclone and remains uninhabited in the aftermath.


title: Ghost town

text: Many abandoned towns and settlements in the former Soviet Union were established near Gulag labour camps to supply necessary services. Since most of these camps were abandoned in the 1950s, the towns were abandoned as well. One such town is located near the former Gulag camp called Butugychag (also called Lower Butugychag). Other towns were deserted due to deindustrialisation and the economic crises of the early 1990s attributed to post-Soviet conflicts – one example being Tkvarcheli in Georgia, a coal mining town that suffered a drastic population decline as a result of the War in Abkhazia in the early 1990s.


title: Ghost town

text: The oldest ghost town in Antarctica is on Deception Island, where in 1906, a Norwegian-Chilean company set up a whaling station at Whalers Bay, which they used as a base for their factory ship, the "Gobernador Bories". Other whaling operations followed suit, and by 1914 there were thirteen factory ships based there. The station ceased to be profitable during the Great Depression, and was abandoned in 1931. In 1969, the station was partially destroyed by a volcanic eruption. There are also many abandoned scientific and military bases in Antarctica, especially in the Antarctic Peninsula.


title: Ghost town

text: The Antarctic island of South Georgia used to have several thriving whaling settlements during the first half of the 20th century, with a combined population exceeding 2,000 in some years. These included Grytviken (operating 1904–64), Leith Harbour (1909–65), Ocean Harbour (1909–20), Husvik (1910–60), Stromness (1912–61) and Prince Olav Harbour (1917–34). The abandoned settlements have become increasingly dilapidated, and remain uninhabited nowadays except for the Museum curator's family at Grytviken. The jetty, the church, dwellings and industrial buildings at Grytviken have recently been renovated by the South Georgian Government, becoming a popular tourist destination. Some historical buildings in the other settlements are being restored as well.


title: Ghost town

text: Urbanization – the migration of a country's rural population into the cities – has left many European towns and villages deserted. An increasing number of settlements in Bulgaria are becoming ghost towns for this reason; at the time of the 2011 census, the country had 181 uninhabited settlements. In Hungary, dozens of villages are also threatened with abandonment. The first village officially declared as "dead" was in the late 1970s, but later it was repopulated as an eco-village. Some other depopulated villages were successfully saved as small rural resorts, such as Kán, Tornakápolna, Szanticska, Gorica, and Révfalu.


title: Ghost town

text: In Spain, large zones of the mountainous Iberian System and the Pyrenees have undergone heavy depopulation since the early 20th century, leaving a string of ghost towns in areas such as the Solana Valley. Traditional agricultural practices such as sheep and goat rearing, on which the mountain village economy was based, were not taken over by the local youth, especially after the lifestyle changes that swept over rural Spain during the second half of the 20th century.


title: Ghost town

text: Examples for ghost towns in Italy include the medieval village of Fabbriche di Careggine near Lago di Vagli, Tuscany, the deserted mountain village Craco located in Basilicata, which has served as a filming location, and the ghost village Roveraia, in the , in province of Arezzo, situated near . During World War II it was an important partisan base and it was definitively abandoned in the 1980s, when the last family who lived here, left the village.. Two projects have been proposed for the recovery of the village: in 2011 the proposal of Movimento Libero Perseo "Roveraia eco - lab", based on sustainability, and in 2019 there was a proposal aiming to recover the village with a mix of functions called "Ecomuseum of Pratomagno".


title: Ghost town

text: In the United Kingdom, thousands of villages were abandoned during the Middle Ages, as a result of Black Death, revolts, and enclosure, the process by which vast amounts of farmland became privately owned. Since there are rarely any visible remains of these settlements, they are not generally considered ghost towns; instead, they are referred to in archaeological circles as deserted medieval villages.


title: Ghost town

text: Sometimes, wars and genocide end a town's life. In 1944, occupying German "Waffen-SS" troops murdered almost the entire population of the French village Oradour-sur-Glane. A new settlement was built nearby after the war, but the old town was left depopulated on the orders of President Charles de Gaulle, as a permanent memorial. In Germany, numerous smaller towns and villages in the former eastern territories were completely destroyed in the last two years of the war. These territories later became part of Poland and the Soviet Union, and many of the smaller settlements were never rebuilt or repopulated, for example Kłomino ("Westfalenhof"), Pstrąże ("Pstransse"), and Janowa Góra ("Johannesberg"). Some villages in England were also abandoned during the war, but for different reasons. Imber, on Salisbury Plain, and several villages in the Stanford Battle Area, were commandeered by the War Office for use as training grounds for British and US troops. Although this was intended to be a temporary measure, the residents were never allowed to return, and the villages have been used for military training ever since. southeast of Imber is Copehill Down, a deserted village purpose-built for training in urban warfare.


title: Ghost town

text: Disasters have played a part in the abandonment of settlements within Europe. After the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, the cities of Pripyat and Chernobyl were evacuated due to dangerous radiation levels within the area. As of today, Pripyat remains completely abandoned, and Chernobyl has around 500 remaining inhabitants.


title: Ghost town

text: An example in the UK of a ghost village which was abandoned before it was ever occupied is at Polphail, Argyll and Bute. The planned development of an oil rig construction facility nearby never materialised, and a village built to house the workers and their families became deserted the moment the building contractors finished their work.


title: Ghost town

text: Canada has several ghost towns in parts of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Quebec. Some were logging towns or dual mining and logging sites, often developed at the behest of the company. In Alberta and Saskatchewan, most ghost towns were once farming communities that have since died off due to the removal of the railway through the town or the bypass of a highway. The ghost towns in British Columbia were predominantly mining towns and prospecting camps as well as canneries and, in one or two cases, large smelter and pulp mill towns. British Columbia has more ghost towns than any other jurisdiction on the North American continent, with more than 1,500 abandoned or semi-abandoned towns and localities. Among the most notable are Anyox, Kitsault, and Ocean Falls.


title: Ghost town

text: Some ghost towns have revived their economies and populations due to historical and eco-tourism, such as Barkerville; once the largest town north of Kamloops, it is now a year-round provincial museum. In Quebec, Val-Jalbert is a well-known tourist ghost town; founded in 1901 around a mechanical pulp mill that became obsolete when paper mills began to break down wood fibre by chemical means, it was abandoned when the mill closed in 1927 and re-opened as a park in 1960.


title: Ghost town

text: Many ghost towns or abandoned communities exist in the American Great Plains, the rural areas of which have lost a third of their population since 1920. Thousands of communities in the northern plains states of Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota became railroad ghost towns when a rail line failed to materialize. Hundreds of towns were abandoned as the Interstate highway system replaced the railroads as the favored means of transportation. Ghost towns are common in mining or mill towns in all the western states, and many eastern and southern states as well. Residents are compelled to leave in search of more productive areas when the resources that had created an employment boom in these towns were eventually exhausted.


title: Ghost town

text: Sometimes a ghost town consists of many abandoned buildings as in Bodie, California, or standing ruins as in Rhyolite, Nevada, while elsewhere only the foundations of former buildings remain as in Graysonia, Arkansas. Old mining camps that have lost most of their population at some stage of their history such as Aspen, Deadwood, Oatman, Tombstone and Virginia City are sometimes referred to as ghost towns although they are presently active towns and cities. Many U.S. ghost towns, such as South Pass City in Wyoming are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.


title: Ghost town

text: Starting in 2002, an attempt to declare an official ghost town in California stalled when the adherents of the town of Bodie and those of Calico, in Southern California, could not agree on the most deserving settlement for the recognition. A compromise was eventually reached—Bodie became the official state gold rush ghost town, while Calico was named the official state silver rush ghost town.


title: Ghost town

text: Another former mining town, Real de Catorce in Mexico, has been used as a backdrop for Hollywood movies such as "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948), "The Mexican" (2001), and "Bandidas" (2006).


title: Ghost town

text: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wave of European immigrants arrived in Brazil and settled in the cities, which offered jobs, education, and other opportunities that enabled newcomers to enter the middle class. Many also settled in the growing small towns along the expanding railway system. Since the 1930s, many rural workers have moved to the big cities. Other ghost towns were created in the aftermath of dinosaur fossil rushes.


title: Ghost town

text: In Colombia, a volcano erupted in 1985, where the city of Armero was engulfed by lahars, which killed approximately 23,000 people in total. Armero was never rebuilt (its inhabitants being diverted to nearby cities, and thus becoming a ghost town), but still stands today as "holy land", as dictated by Pope John Paul II.


title: Ghost town

text: A number of ghost towns throughout South America were once mining camps or lumber mills, such as the many saltpeter mining camps that prospered in Chile from the end of the Saltpeter War until the invention of synthetic saltpeter during World War I. Some of these towns, such as the Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works in the Atacama Desert, have been declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites.


title: Ghost town

text: The boom and bust of gold rushes and the mining of other ores has led to a number of ghost towns in both Australia and New Zealand. Other towns have become abandoned whether due to natural disasters, the weather, or the drowning of valleys to increase the size of lakes.


title: Ghost town

text: In Australia, the Victoria gold rush led to numerous ghost towns (such as Cassilis and Moliagul), as did the hunt for gold in Western Australia (for example, the towns of Ora Banda and Kanowna). The mining of iron and other ores has also led to towns thriving briefly before dwindling.